Earlier this month, the Self team offered $10K in bounties for developers integrating Self’s onchain and offchain SDK at EthGlobal Cannes. Self founders and team members worked closely with builders over the weekend, supporting as they integrated zk-powered identity verification tools into their projects. 

Among those builders were the Ascend team, a group of three developers building a zero-knowledge inheritance protocol that “ensures your crypto doesn’t die with you.” 

• Tim Sigl, a smart contract auditor and former full-stack app dev

• Kian Lütke, a frontend-focused software engineer with a flair for the cloud

• Tom Albrecht, an AI strategist shaping intelligent systems at scale

Tim, Kian, and Tom created their automated app to let verified humans claim their assets privately and cross-chain. The app lets users choose who will inherit their onchain assets, with those recipients proving their unique personhood via Self during setup. After a user passes on their assets, recipients must prove their identity again via Self to claim. 

After winning the third-place Onchain Self SDK bounty, Tim, Kian, and Tom caught up with the Self team to share why they decided to create a ZK-powered inheritance app and what the future of Ascend looks like. 

What inspired you to build Ascend?

We were inspired by a simple question: What happens to your crypto when you die? Right now, the answer is often: nothing—assets stay locked, lost forever. We wanted to fix that. With Ascend, we’re making it easy to set up a trustless inheritance plan, so your loved ones can focus on healing instead of navigating wallets on different chains searching for your assets.

When did you decide identity verification was a core pillar necessary to solve for?

We decided identity verification was a core pillar of Ascend very early on. We realized that just assigning a wallet address isn’t enough. Wallets can be lost, keys stolen, or worse—set up by impostors. We needed a second layer of assurance that the person behind the wallet is the same one the grantor intended to inherit the assets.

Additionally, many people set up beneficiaries they don’t interact with daily—think relatives abroad or old friends. In those cases, there’s no simple way to verify someone’s real-world identity. By requiring each beneficiary to prove they are a unique human being using zero-knowledge proofs, we remove ambiguity and ensure that inheritance stays personal and secure.

Why did you choose Self for the identity layer?

We chose Self because it aligns well with our priorities: privacy and ease of use. Its zero-knowledge approach lets us verify identities without storing or processing any personal information—essential for a sensitive use case like inheritance. At the same time, the Self app offers a smooth experience for users. Thanks to trusted execution environments, generating and submitting proofs is fast and reliable, both during setup and when claiming.

What’s your vision for the future of Ascend?

We are already planning to clean up the repo, polish the UI, and work together to make Ascend not just a hackathon project but a real dApp that gets used in the real world. 

The beauty of decentralization, on-device zero-knowledge proofs, and the use of smart contracts is that we don’t need to build the backend. It’s already there on the chain. So, for us, it seems like a feasible side project to get going with in the very near future, and we are excited to continue our journey into the Web3 world.

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