A claim is not a transfer. While the challenge window is open, you can end it by doing essentially anything.
How to cancel
Open the app. That is the whole procedure. The heartbeat it sends is owner activity, and owner activity clears a live claim.
There is also an explicit cancel action on the inheritance screen. In practice you will rarely reach it: unlocking the app checks the chain and clears the claim for you within a second or two, so by the time the screen is drawn the claim is usually already gone. The button is there for the case where that automatic check cannot complete — no fee balance, no connection.
Anything counts
A heartbeat, a transfer, a settings change, a deposit. The program treats any owner action as proof of life and clears the claim status. There is no way to be present in the app and still lose the estate.
What happens next
- Claim status
- Cleared. No claim is in progress.
- Your inactivity timer
Reset to zero. The full span must elapse again before another claim.
- Your heir
Unchanged. Still your heir, still confirmed, back to waiting.
- Deposited assets
- Untouched, still in the inheritance vault.
- Vault items
Still sealed. The gate reads the chain live, so it re-blocks the moment the claim clears.
- Fees
Your heir paid for the transactions they sent. Those are not refunded.
Why the vault re-seals instantly
The release gate does not cache a verdict. Every attempt to unlock re-reads the on-chain claim status at that moment. A cancelled claim therefore closes the vault immediately — an heir cannot rely on a decision made a second earlier.
Talk to your heir
The system does not explain itself. From their side, a cancelled claim looks like weeks of process evaporating, and they may well have been acting in good faith after genuinely being unable to reach you.
If a claim was started in bad faith
Cancelling is instant, but it does not remove the person. An heir who tried to claim while you were demonstrably alive will simply wait and try again. Change the heir — see changing or removing your heir — and review which vault items were scoped to them.
If you were too late
If the challenge window closed and the claim finalized, cancelling is no longer available: finalization is terminal by design, so that a returning owner cannot strip an heir of something already granted.
A genuine false trigger has a separate route — an owner reclaim that returns the configuration to a fresh state, available only after a grace period during which the heir could have withdrawn. See I missed my check-in.
Assets your heir has already withdrawn are theirs on-chain, and no program action brings them back. That is a conversation, not a transaction.