Vaultara

What is Vaultara?

Vaultara is a decentralized crypto inheritance protocol designed to solve one of the biggest issues in cryptocurrency: lost assets due to the owner passing away, becoming inactive, or losing private keys. Today, more than 140 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin alone is estimated to be permanently inaccessible because the original owners never shared recovery details.

Vaultara protects crypto wealth for future generations through an automated inheritance system. The protocol ensures that if the owner stops being active for a long period, their funds will be automatically transferred to selected beneficiaries without depending on lawyers, courts, or centralized companies.

The Problem

Right now:

• If a crypto holder dies, the family often has no way to access funds
• Private keys are usually kept secret and taken to the grave
• Centralized recovery solutions are risky and require trusting third parties
• Traditional legal inheritance systems do not apply to decentralized assets

Real financial impact:

• About 3 to 4 million Bitcoin are estimated to be permanently lost
• Around 20 percent of all Bitcoin have not moved in more than five years
• There is no standard method for digital asset inheritance in Web3

This results in families losing life-changing wealth that can never be recovered.

My Solution: The Heartbeat Mechanism

Vaultara introduces an on-chain activity check called the heartbeat mechanism. It works as follows:

1. The owner creates a vault and selects a heartbeat interval (example: 7 days, 30 days, or even a year)
2. The owner adds beneficiaries along with their share percentages and encrypted personal details
3. The owner deposits ETH into the vault
4. The owner keeps sending heartbeat transactions to prove they are still active
5. If the heartbeat time limit expires, anyone is allowed to activate inheritance
6. The smart contract then distributes funds to all beneficiaries instantly

This creates a trustless and fully automated inheritance system.

Key Features

For Owners

Vault Management:

• Set and update the heartbeat interval
• Add, edit, and remove beneficiaries
• Fine control over each beneficiary’s share percentage
• Withdraw funds or deactivate the vault anytime before inheritance is triggered

Security and Privacy:

• Beneficiary data is encrypted using Lit Protocol
• Only the owner can view or decrypt the details
• Strong access control using OpenZeppelin smart contract modules
• All funds stay in the owner’s wallet until deposited by their own approval

Transparency:

• All actions are fully visible on-chain
• Countdown timer shows remaining heartbeat time
• Smart contract source code is public and verified

For Beneficiaries

• Automatically receive funds if the owner becomes inactive
• No legal disputes
• No dependency on any centralized entity or lawyer
• Identity remains private until inheritance happens

Public Monitoring

• Anyone can trigger inheritance once the vault expires
• Prevents assets from being locked forever
• Encourages community involvement

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Smart Contract Overview

Main Contract: VaultaraInheritance.sol

Important properties it manages:

• Heartbeat interval and last activity time
• List of beneficiaries and their share percentages
• Vault activation status
• Protection from misuse and double inheritance

Key functions include:

• Initializing a vault
• Sending heartbeats
• Managing beneficiaries
• Funding or withdrawing funds
• Triggering inheritance when the vault expires
• Checking time remaining and vault status

Events are logged for every major action for complete traceability.

User Experience

The dashboard provides:

• Wallet connection support through MetaMask
• Countdown timer for heartbeat expiry
• Vault balance display
• Beneficiary management tools
• Transaction history synced from Blockscout
• Alerts and confirmations for important actions

Once the vault expires:

A trigger button appears to allow inheritance execution

Security Practices

Smart Contract:

• Uses trusted OpenZeppelin libraries
• Reentrancy protection to stop complex attack patterns
• Strict validation rules for inputs
• Logs every critical action for audits

Encryption:

• Only encrypted beneficiary data is stored on-chain
• Lit Protocol ensures beneficiary privacy and secure key access

Frontend:

• No private key exposure
• Safe UI with input validation and protection mechanisms

Testing and Deployment

• Smart contracts tested with Hardhat and Mocha
• Verified on the Sepolia testnet
• Publicly available for inspection on Blockscout

Contract Address: ``` 0xC11949532F5C46d567D254dCcFAd4BDC87f1306A` Network: Ethereum Sepolia Testnet

Use Cases

• Long-term crypto holders
• Parents planning digital inheritance for children
• Elderly investors who want a secure fallback
• Business owners and DAOs managing treasury continuity
• People with medical risks who want future financial assurance

Current Version Limitations

This is an MVP. The following improvements are planned:

• Support multiple vaults per user
• Mainnet deployment
• Support for ERC20 tokens and NFTs
• Multi-signature vault ownership
• More private and advanced encryption techniques
• Guardian and social recovery options

Roadmap

Upcoming updates:

• Multi-chain expansion
• Notifications through email or mobile app
• DeFi position inheritance (example: Aave or Compound)
• Zero-knowledge beneficiary privacy

Future long-term vision:

• Integration with real-world estate planning industry
• White-label integrations for wallets and exchanges
• A complete solution for Web3 asset inheritance

Market Potential

• More than 420 million crypto users globally
• A multi-trillion dollar crypto economy
• A traditional inheritance and estate management industry worth billions

Vaultara supports financial security across generations and protects families from unnecessary loss.

Why It Matters

Crypto gives financial independence. Vaultara ensures that this independence continues even after the owner is gone. It guarantees:

• Wealth always reaches the intended family
• No funds are lost permanently
• Full control while alive
• No need to trust any third party

Vaultara turns digital inheritance into a simple, guaranteed, and decentralized process.

Vaultara is built as a modern Web3 application, combining secure smart contracts, encrypted data management, and a responsive frontend. Our goal was to create a decentralized inheritance system that is both secure and user-friendly, suitable for real-world usage.

Backend and Smart Contract Development

For smart contract development, we used Hardhat version 3.0.7 as our primary development environment. Hardhat offered excellent TypeScript support, a robust testing framework, and deployment tools that made the development process faster and more reliable. Hardhat Ignition allowed us to declaratively deploy contracts, track deployment states, and resume partial deployments without errors. Local testing was conducted using Hardhat Network, while essential plugins from Hardhat Toolbox provided utilities for testing, deployment, and contract verification.

The contracts were written in Solidity version 0.8.20. We chose this version because it provides built-in overflow and underflow protection, custom errors for gas efficiency, and compatibility with modern tools. We enabled compiler optimizations with 200 runs to balance deployment costs and runtime gas efficiency. OpenZeppelin Contracts v5.4.0 was used to implement standard security features, such as access control and reentrancy protection, ensuring robust and audited contract logic.

Key architectural decisions included a single-contract-per-vault design for simplicity and gas efficiency, using structs and mappings for fast lookups and arrays for iterations when distributing funds, and emitting events for transparency and auditability.

Frontend Development

The frontend is built with React and TypeScript. React’s component-based architecture and ecosystem allowed rapid development and easy integration with Web3 wallets, while TypeScript ensured type safety and early bug detection. Vite was used as the build tool for fast hot-reloading and optimized production builds. Tailwind CSS facilitated responsive, utility-first styling with dark mode support.

We implemented custom hooks to manage wallet connections, contract interactions, encryption, and transaction tracking. For example, useWallet handles MetaMask connectivity and network switching, useVaultaraContract manages smart contract read/write operations with automatic data refresh, and useLitProtocol handles encryption of beneficiary data. We also included transaction history fetching from Blockscout, with event parsing and auto-refresh functionality.

Partner Technology Integrations

Vaultara leverages Lit Protocol for decentralized encryption. This ensures that beneficiary data is encrypted on-chain, accessible only to authorized users, and protected against tampering. Integrating Lit Protocol required custom browser polyfills and type conversions, which we handled within the frontend build configuration. Blockscout provided a public API for transaction tracking without needing a backend, allowing real-time transaction monitoring and contract verification.

Testing and Security

We conducted extensive testing with 48 tests covering contract deployment, vault lifecycle, heartbeat mechanics, beneficiary management, fund distribution, access control, and edge cases. Testing time-based logic, such as heartbeat expiry, was achieved by manipulating blockchain time locally. Reentrancy attacks, invalid input scenarios, and incorrect percentage allocations were thoroughly tested to ensure security.

Gas optimization techniques included the use of custom errors, efficient storage patterns, caching variables in memory, and short-circuit evaluation for conditions. These optimizations reduced gas costs and improved contract efficiency.

Notable and Hacky Implementations

Several implementations stand out as particularly clever. We built a real-time countdown timer for heartbeat expiration, designed optimistic UI updates to improve user experience during transactions, and implemented automatic network switching for MetaMask with proper error handling. Share percentage validations prevent users from exceeding 100%, and a hybrid approach of event listening and polling ensures the frontend stays in sync with contract state. We also managed multiple modals without a library, worked around BigInt serialization issues in React, and pre-estimated gas to avoid failed transactions.

Architecture Decisions and Trade-offs

We chose a single contract per vault for simplicity, on-chain encrypted storage for privacy and decentralization, owner-set heartbeat intervals for flexibility, and basis points for beneficiary percentages to maintain precision. We used a hybrid approach of event-driven updates supplemented by polling to ensure reliable state tracking.

Deployment and Workflow

Smart contracts were compiled, tested, and deployed to the Sepolia testnet using Hardhat Ignition, with contract verification on Blockscout. Frontend deployment was handled with Vercel after building optimized production bundles. The development workflow included test-driven contract development, iterative frontend testing, and coverage verification.

Performance Metrics

Smart contract operations, such as initializing vaults, sending heartbeat signals, adding beneficiaries, and triggering inheritance, were optimized for gas efficiency. Frontend performance was optimized with a bundle size under 800KB, fast first contentful paint, and high Lighthouse scores.

Conclusion

Vaultara demonstrates a secure, tested, and user-friendly Web3 product built within a short development window. By combining smart contract best practices, decentralized encryption, responsive frontend design, and careful testing, we created a platform that ensures privacy, transparency, and reliability. Key achievements include Lit Protocol integration, real-time UI updates, optimized gas usage, and seamless wallet and transaction management.