The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “antifragile,” meaning that it does not rely on the goodwill of any party to achieve its goal. No one but the sender and recipient has access to the file’s contents, all other parties receive financial incentives to cooperate, and redundancies ensure the payload is always available. “Small chains of data control our lives,” says Hamilton. Because humans are “sticky,” meaning unreliable and error-prone, cryptography is the only sensible protection for these strings, he adds.
According to Hamilton, there are several other ways to deploy Sarcophagus outside of a crypto environment. A digital dead man’s switch could be used by a whistleblower to publish incriminating material, or by a dissident or journalist who suspects a threat to their life, as a kind of SOS. In a more everyday context, it could 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 managed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) – a collective that governs the treasury and development process of Sarcophagus through a system of community voting. In its current state, Sarcophagus is best described as “early beta,” says Hamilton. The service is operational, but is not widely used and does not generate significant revenue – only a small portion of each payment.
One barrier to wider adoption is that recipients must already have access to a crypto wallet, whose credentials will be used to decrypt the data payload. There is an option to create a new wallet for someone, along with a PDF that walks them through the access process, but some level of crypto knowledge would certainly be helpful.
As the generation of people familiar with crypto grows older and begins to more seriously consider their mortality, Hamilton expects a larger subset will begin to understand the need for a service like Sarcophagus. “Millennials are just starting to think about this issue,” he says. Hamilton expects that more accessible services will also be built on the sarcophagus technology. These “boomer products,” as Hamilton calls them, one of which his own team is developing, will abstract some of the technical complexity so people won’t realize they’re using crypto infrastructure. (Although there is an inevitable trade-off between security and convenience.)
In any case, Hamilton says, the current system, where credentials for high-value crypto wallets could be stored in bank vaults protected by armed guards, borders on the absurd. The “billion-dollar filing cabinet” has to go, says Hamilton. “We still rely on heavy metal doors and guys with guns when cryptography itself can seem like a steel wall of incredible thickness.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK.