EngagementFamily Office Recovery
ReferenceFOR · 2026
StatusThreshold custody
Family Office Recovery

Continuity of access. Across generations.

A family office holds the credentials that hold the wealth. The accounts that pay the trustees, the wallets that hold the alternatives, the signing keys to the entities that own everything else. Lose those, and the wealth is unreachable for years.

The kind of arrangement a family office is for.

Threshold custody3 of 5 typical
CryptographyAES & Shamir
Server-side stateNone held
HoldersPrincipal, family, counsel
Review cadenceAnnual
EngagementWhite-glove available
§ 01 · Fiduciary concerns

The failure modes a family actually encounters.

Not the dramatic kind. The slow, structural kind that compound across decades and surface at the worst possible moments.
i.Generational handoff

The patriarch held everything.

One generation built the office. The credentials, contacts, and combinations were never written down because they did not need to be. When the next generation inherits, they inherit the wealth and the puzzle of how to reach it.

ii.Sudden incapacity

The principal becomes unreachable.

Stroke. Cognitive decline. A medical event that lasts months. The family needs to operate the office without the one person who could authorize everything, and without handing one person full power in the meantime.

iii.Vendor exit

The custodian or platform shuts down.

A custody provider that was supposed to last for decades is acquired, restructured, or wound down. The migration is brutal at small scale and worse at large scale. The family bears the operational risk.

iv.Coercion or compromise

Pressure on a single holder.

Threats. Social engineering. The phone call at three in the morning that sounds authoritative and urgent. Any single individual with full access is, eventually, the target.

§ 02 · Statement of holdings

What this covers.

Off-chain & on-chain
# Custody item Class Sensitivity
i.
Entity signing keys
The credentials behind the LLCs, trusts, and holding entities that own everything else.
Corporate
Critical
ii.
Custodian access
Logins, MFA backups, and recovery questions for the family's primary financial institutions.
Financial
Critical
iii.
Digital asset recovery
Seed phrases and recovery codes for any on-chain holdings, multisig backups, custody integrations.
Digital
Critical
iv.
Document vaults
The passwords to the digital deposit boxes that hold trusts, wills, and incorporation papers.
Legal
High
v.
Communications channels
The email accounts and phone numbers used to verify identity to every vendor downstream.
Operational
High
5 items covered · threshold custody Reviewed annually
Wealth that is unreachable is, for as long as it is unreachable, absent.
Threshold Vault · Engagement principle
§ 03 · Engagement

From conversation to ceremony.

For larger family arrangements, this is run with a live operator on a setup call. The mechanics are the same as the standard product; the difference is the conversation that surrounds them.

§ 04 · Cryptography disclosure

Open primitives. Auditable by counsel.

The two-layer scheme is documented in full, the source is public, and the test vectors are independently verifiable. Bring your own auditor; the math will not surprise them.
i
Layer I · Cipher

AES-256-GCM encrypts

Authenticated symmetric encryption. GCM mode detects tampering on recovery. The same cipher used to protect classified material at the highest civilian level.

CipherAES-256
ModeGCM, authenticated
ImplementationOpen source
ii
Layer II · Scheme

Shamir splits the key

From Adi Shamir's 1979 paper. Each share is a point on a polynomial over a finite field. K points reconstruct it. Fewer than K reveal zero information about the key.

SchemeShamir K-of-N
FieldGF(256)
Test vectors51 published
§ 05 · Statement of server holdings

We hold zero.

Server-side state, by categoryAs of ceremony
i.
Credential bundle
[ NULL ]not stored
ii.
Encryption key
[ NULL ]not stored
iii.
Shamir shares
[ NULL ]not stored
iv.
Holder identities
[ NULL ]not stored
v.
Recovery audit log
client-sideoffline only
§ 06 · Holder roster

The five trusted parties.

Configurable to your family's actual roles. The roster below is the typical configuration; adjust for the people you actually have.
i.
P

Principal

The person who established the office and historically held the access.

ii.
S

Spouse or partner

A second principal of equal standing, in a different physical location.

iii.
G

Generation two

An adult child or named successor, formally part of the recovery quorum.

iv.
C

Family counsel

The attorney who already holds the will. The natural neutral third party.

v.
V

Family vault

A sealed copy in the family's safe deposit box or institutional deposit.

+

Bespoke holders

Trustees, family-office staff, additional generations — configurable.

3
Any three of the five reconstruct. No single departure is a crisis. No two together can act alone.
§ 07 · Memoranda

From conversations with family principals.

A sealed envelope with the lawyer is a single point of failure with a single party. Threshold custody requires three independent parties to convene before anything is reconstructed. The lawyer remains in the configuration, but is not, alone, sufficient.
Yes. This is a recovery scheme that sits behind your custodian, not a replacement for it. Day-to-day operations continue unchanged. The threshold scheme is the answer to what happens if the custodian relationship itself becomes inaccessible.
Yes. Each holder receives a one-page Field Card written for a non-technical reader, assuming nothing, explaining the rules in plain language. They are not asked to understand cryptography; they are asked to follow a clear protocol when the day comes.
The cryptographic primitive is jurisdiction-neutral. The human protocol around it adapts to where holders actually live. For complex structures, an engagement call is the right way to map the recovery scheme onto the actual legal architecture.
Recovery does not require us to exist. The tool ships inside your archive, runs offline, and the cryptographic core is open source. A family office holding shards thirty years from now still recovers, against the open reference implementation.
By engagement

An arrangement that outlasts any one party.

Try the cryptography on a throwaway value. No signup. When the conversation calls for an engagement, we set it up directly with the family.

For family offices beyond a standard configuration.

Custom thresholds. Multi-generational holders. White-glove ceremony with a live operator. Bespoke documentation alongside your counsel.

Open a conversation →