A Last Will and Blockchain Testament – Ensuring Crypto Wealth Is Passed On to Successors

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Money never sleeps, it’s said. More than that, though – money never dies. Human beings do, of course. It’s this fact that drives us – to make life meaningful, to create and make our mark and hopefully to leave something behind.

Society has well-established processes available that ensure our wealth and other belongings are passed on to those we leave behind.

Yet, with the sudden arrival into our world of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, estate planning has been found lacking. Meanwhile, such assets become an ever larger component of investors’ portfolios.

The problems of legacy provision

The novel nature of this form of wealth adds an extra layer to the usual problems that come with making plans for our succession. Naturally, most of us don’t readily want to face our mortality. Therefore, procrastination for such tasks as writing a will is quite normal.

For much of our lives, we believe that our final hour lies far in the future – so, it doesn’t even seem much like procrastination most of the time.

Many people are also ignorant of the process, not knowing what to do nor whom to consult, and they remain so until events rudely prod them quite suddenly. And then there is the thorny problem of assigning to whom it should all go and in the proportions most fitting.

Once all of these usual impediments and considerations are tackled, there remains the technical issue of how to incorporate estate planning for digital assets like cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, many have fallen at this final hurdle, leaving various considerable digital hordes forever lost in the event of their deaths.

One famous example involved Andrew Mellon of the famous Mellon banking family. One might think that someone with such a financial pedigree would have a plan in place to ensure that all of his holdings be passed on to successors. But his death, unfortunately, left around $200 million of cryptocurrency inaccessible in cold storage wallets.

Though not all are as spectacular as this case, there are numerous such examples of digital assets becoming irretrievable upon the death of their owner.

Research reveals that around four million Bitcoins – or the equivalent of $95 billion based on current pricing – has already been irreversibly lost. Not all of this will be due to lost access due to a lack of legacy provision. However, it demonstrates how easy it is to lose access to this new form of asset.

How to pass…