Why we don't ask your nominee for KYC.
Every "digital inheritance" service I've reviewed asks the nominee, at the moment of claim, for an Aadhaar copy, a passport-size photo, sometimes a video selfie. The argument is that you can't release a vault to just anyone. Identity has to be proven.
I think that argument is wrong, and Lyfos doesn't ask for any of it. Here is the reasoning.
Nominee KYC fails when it matters most
The moment a family member is filing a claim, they are by definition inside the worst week of their life. Their KYC documents are likely in a drawer they can't find. The Aadhaar in the file at the office. The PAN card on the desk of someone in another city. You have just turned the already-impossible task of grieving into a paperwork sprint.
And the verification you'd do on those documents wouldn't actually catch a hostile claimant — anyone determined enough to fake a death and a nominee identity will get an Aadhaar copy through the same hostile route.
The trust we substitute
Instead, we put trust where it actually lives: in the five humans you already chose.
- You picked them. Your siblings, oldest friends, family lawyer, accountant — people the impostor would have to compromise three of. That's a much higher bar than a forged document.
- They are verified, individually. Each holder accepts the invite with their own Lyfos account, derives their own keypair, registers their own public key. There is no "shared" holder slot you can take over.
- They get to know. When a release starts, each holder is told who is claiming and why. A wrong nominee would get vetoed by any one of three who knows you.
- You get 14 days. The owner-protection hold is the safety valve. Even if all five holders were somehow compromised at once, you still have two weeks of alerts on four channels to abort.
What we lose
We give up the appearance of compliance theatre. We can't put "KYC verified" in our marketing copy. A regulator who skims the design might flinch. We're prepared to defend the choice on the merits — and the death-simulation runbook is the defence.
What we gain
A claim flow your family can complete on the worst day of their life without going home to dig through a filing cabinet. That, to me, is the test. If grandma can't claim because she can't find her Aadhaar at 11pm on a Sunday, we have failed at the only thing Lyfos exists to do.