Hamilton said the system is designed to be “antifragile,” meaning it does not rely on the goodwill of any one party to achieve its goals. No one except the initiator and recipient has access to the file’s contents, all other parties have financial incentives to cooperate, and redundancy ensures that the payload is always available. “A small string of data controls our lives,” Hamilton said. He added that because humans are “slimy” — that is, unreliable and error-prone — the only sensible protection for these strings is cryptography.
Hamilton said the sarcophagus could also be used in a variety of other ways outside of cryptographic environments. A digital death switch can be used by whistleblowers to publish incriminating material, or as a distress signal for dissidents or journalists who suspect their lives are in danger. In a more mundane context, it can be used to pass account credentials from one generation of employees to the next.
Illustration: Alberto Miranda
Sarcophagus has raised $6 million in funding to date from investors including Placeholder, Blockchange and Hinge Capital. The project is governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) – a collective that manages the Sarcophagus vault and development process through a community voting system. In its current state, Sarcophagus is best described as an “early beta,” Hamilton said. The service is live but not widely used and doesn’t generate a lot of revenue – just a small cut of each payment.
One barrier to wider adoption is that the recipient must already have access to the crypto wallet, whose credentials are used to decrypt the data payload. There is an option to create a new wallet for someone and provide a PDF that walks them through the process of accessing it, but some level of cryptography knowledge will definitely help.
As the crypto-comfortable generation ages and begins to think more seriously about their own mortality, Hamilton believes more people will begin to understand the need for services like Sarcophagus. “Millennials are just starting to think about this,” he said. Hamilton imagines that more accessibility services will also be built on Sarcophagus technology. Hamilton calls these “boomer products” one of the products his own team is developing that will remove some of the technical complexity so people don’t realize they are using cryptographic infrastructure. (Although there is an inevitable trade-off between security and convenience.)
Regardless, Hamilton said the current system — where credentials for high-value crypto wallets may be stored in bank vaults protected by armed guards — borders on the absurd. Hamilton said “billions of dollars worth of filing cabinets” must be dismantled. “We still rely on heavy metal doors and men with guns when cryptography itself can act as a steel wall of incredible thickness.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK.