Nvidia's board met on 11 November 2026 to decide whether to remove CEO Jensen Huang, and at least one analyst pointed out that the chipmaker doesn't have a clear plan for who takes over. Your crypto can have the same gap: if you're the only person who knows where it is and how to unlock it, a hospital stay or worse leaves your family with a balance nobody can reach. A crypto succession plan fixes that by making sure the right people can act when you can't, without giving anyone the keys today.
We make a hardware wallet, so we come at this from the custody and recovery side. Nothing here is advice about Nvidia shares, and we're not adding to the speculation about the board's decision, which was still open when this was written.
What's happening at Nvidia
The board opened an independent investigation on 8 November into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, saying it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised. On 11 November the Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust him, and Nvidia shares fell about 8% in after-hours trading, according to CBS News.
Reuters reported that Huang, 63, has no obvious successor. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told the agency that removing him immediately "could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place." We wrote about the first leg of this sell-off in what one bad Monday teaches about where you keep your crypto; this week's lesson is about what happens when one person holds everything together.
The key-person problem in your own wallet
Companies worry about key-person risk because a business that depends on one individual stalls when that person is suddenly gone. Self-custody has the same shape. With a hardware wallet, your private key and its backup are the only way in, and if the backup lives in your head or in a drawer only you know about, the plan ends with you.
The usual cases aren't dramatic. Someone has an accident and spends weeks unable to manage their affairs, or a partner needs to pay a bill from savings that sit in a wallet they've never opened. Each of these is a temporary absence, and a good plan handles them as well as the permanent one. Our guides on crypto inheritance and the five estate planning mistakes that lock families out cover the legal side in depth.
What a crypto succession plan needs
A working plan answers four questions. Your family needs to know the wallet exists, which most people never say out loud. They need to know where the recovery pieces are kept, written in a letter or a document stored with your will rather than inside the will itself, since wills can become public. They also need steps they can follow without you on the phone, in plain language, tested by someone who isn't a crypto user. Finally, the plan should stop any one person from taking the funds early, which is why splitting the backup across people or places is better than handing one relative the full seed phrase.
Running a dry run once a year is the step most people skip. Ask the person you've named to walk through your instructions with a small test wallet, and fix whatever confuses them.
How Ryder One handles the handover
TapSafe Recovery was designed around this tension. Your backup is split between a Recovery Tag and an encrypted piece stored in your own iCloud or Google Drive, and you can add optional Recovery Contacts who each hold a share, see nothing about your balances, and can't get into the wallet alone. If you die or can't act, your Recovery Tag plus two of your Recovery Contacts can restore the wallet without your cloud backup, and that's the path we recommend for family. The seed phrase stays available on the device under the BIP-39 standard as a last resort, so your family isn't tied to our hardware either.
Whatever wallet you use, the board at Nvidia is a useful prompt this week. Write down who would step in for you, tell them the plan exists, and test it while you're around to answer questions. If you're setting up self-custody for the first time and want recovery built in from day one, take a look at Ryder One.
Share: