The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “anti-fragile,” which means it depends upon no get together’s good will to realize its finish. No one however the originator and recipient have entry to the contents of the file, all different events are financially incentivized to cooperate, and redundancies make sure the payload is all the time out there. “Little strings of data control our lives,” says Hamilton. As a result of people are “gooey”—that’s, unreliable and susceptible to errors—the one wise safety for these strings is cryptography, he provides.

There are numerous different methods, says Hamilton, that Sarcophagus could be utilized outdoors of a crypto setting. A digital useless man’s change might be utilized by a whistleblower to launch incriminating materials or by a dissident or journalist who suspects a menace to their life, as a sort of SOS. In a extra mundane context, it might be used to cross account credentials from one technology of staff to the subsequent.

Sarcophagus has obtained $6 million in funding thus far from traders together with Placeholder, Blockchange, and Hinge Capital. The venture is managed by a decentralized autonomous group, or DAO—a collective that governs the Sarcophagus treasury and growth course of by a system of neighborhood voting. In its current state, Sarcophagus is finest described as an “early beta,” says Hamilton. The service is operational however not extensively used, and it doesn’t generate important income—solely a small minimize of each fee.

One barrier to broader adoption is that recipients should have already got entry to a crypto pockets, whose credentials are used to decrypt the information payload. There may be an choice to create a brand new pockets for somebody, together with a PDF strolling them by the method for accessing it, however a stage of crypto literacy would definitely assist.

Because the technology of individuals snug with crypto grows older and begins to reckon extra critically with their mortality, Hamilton thinks a bigger subset will start to know the necessity for a service like Sarcophagus. “Millennials are just starting to think about this problem,” he says. Hamilton imagines that extra accessible companies will probably be constructed atop Sarcophagus know-how, too. These “boomer products,” as Hamilton calls them, certainly one of which his personal group is growing, will summary away a few of the technical complexity, such that individuals received’t notice they’re utilizing crypto infrastructure. (Though there’s an inevitable trade-off between safety and comfort.)

In any case, says Hamilton, the current system—whereby credentials to high-value crypto wallets could be saved in financial institution vaults protected by armed guards—approaches the absurd. The “billion-dollar file cabinet” has to go, says Hamilton. “We are still relying on heavy metal doors and guys with guns when cryptography itself can act as a steel wall of incredible thickness.”

This text initially appeared within the Could/June 2024 challenge of WIRED UK.