Show HN: Shardium – open-source "Dead Man's Switch" for crypto inheritance (shardium.xyz)

4 points by cylinderthought ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm Max.

I built this because I was terrified that if I die tomorrow, my family gets nothing. The existing solutions were either trusting a centralized custodian or complex hardware setups.

Shardium is a client-side tool that splits your seed phrase into 3 shards using Shamir's Secret Sharing.

Shard A: You keep.

Shard B: You give to a beneficiary (PDF).

Shard C: We hold (or you self-host).

It works as a dead man's switch: If you are inactive for 90 days (email ping), Shard C is released to your beneficiary. They combine B + C to recover the funds.

The Stack:

secrets.js-grempe for the math.

FastAPI + PostgreSQL backend.

Client-side encryption (seed never hits the network).

It is 100% Open Source and MIT Licensed. You can self-host it for free ($0), or use the managed version.

I'd love your feedback on the security model. Roast my code here: https://github.com/pyoneerC/shardium

3 comments

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I prefer to do a 4 shares / 2 needed for recovery.

I keep 2 on different storage media, 1 with a trusted beneficiary, 1 with a different trusted beneficiary.

This does mean that the beneficiaries can collude to rob me tho. But it is simpler than running & trusting some kind of live service imo.

Why not use Vaultwatden for this ? It has a built in dead man switch recovery system.
big fan of vaultwarden (i self-host it).

the main difference is architecture: shardium splits the secret (shamir) so the server never holds the full data, whereas vaultwarden holds the full encrypted vault.

also the "grandma factor": getting non-tech family to setup a vaultwarden account was friction. this is just "find paper in drawer, scan qr".