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How it Works: Vault12 Digital Inheritance
Vault12 Digital Inheritance is the first solution to offer a simple, direct, and secure way for all types of investors to ensure that all of your digital assets can be accessed by future generations.
December 08 2021
- Traditional approaches to the inheritance of assets, when applied to digital assets, create complexity and risk.
- Your portfolio of digital assets is continually changing — you cannot rely on doing an inventory once, or for that matter continuously, without assistance.
- This simple and direct approach reduces the uncertainty around assets not being available to the designated recipient. It also avoids having to approach and petition each service individually during probate to gain access.
The Vault12 platform provides protection, backup resilience, and security to your digital assets. Vault12 Digital Inheritance enables you to designate a beneficiary (an executor, trustee, or other chosen beneficiary) who can inherit the entire portfolio of digital assets that you choose to store in your Vault. There is no need to continually update an inventory or to issue updated instructions.
- You can use a Vault12 Digital Vault to store Digital assets, including cryptocurrency, financial login information, legal documents, medical records, and more.
- The Vault is protected by your network of Guardians — friends, family, and/or business associates — people that you know and trust.
- A beneficiary is designated by the Vault owner from the chosen Guardians, and a declaration is digitally signed. This can then be emailed to other parties, e.g. lawyers.
- When the Vault Owner's legally-defined trigger for the inheritance event occurs (incapacitation or passing on), the beneficiary indicates that they are ready to access the digital assets, a designated number of Guardians approve the request, and the assets are unlocked and transferred to the beneficiary.
- Should the beneficiary attempt to access the assets before they are intended to, the owner can veto the request before any of the Guardians receive an approval request.
Let's see the process step by step:
I. Configuring Inheritance
Starting Point — Make sure you are using the latest app, that your Vault is already set up, Guardians have been assigned, and assets added. To recap how to do this, watch this video.
- As the Vault owner, you need to turn on the Digital Inheritance capability, and assign a beneficiary from your group of Guardians. Depending on what you and your Trust & Estates lawyer have agreed in terms of a Will or a Living Trust, the designated individual could be the Beneficiary or the Executor, or in fact, the Trustee — this is entirely up to you and your lawyer.
- Click on the setting icon and select "Inheritance," which will enable you to designate one of your Guardians as the inheritor.
2. Once designated, you will be asked to fill in some details like full legal names, and these will be inserted into a legal declaration that documents the assignment of your digital assets to the designated Guardian at some point in the future.
3. Once you've reviewed the declaration and signed it, a copy is sent to the Beneficiary together with an invitation to accept. You may want to call your Beneficiary at this point to discuss your wishes for the future.
II. Activating Inheritance as the beneficiary
- When the time comes to access the inherited digital assets, the Beneficiary opens the Vault12 app, selects the Vault to be inherited, and activates Inheritance. This will send a safeguard message to the Vault owner — just in case the Beneficiary is actually jumping the gun. The owner has a set period of time — 48 hours — to veto the request.
2. Once the Vault is ready, the Beneficiary is asked to contact the Vault owner's Guardians.
The Guardians are contacted out of band, e.g., by phone by the Beneficiary, and asked to do a Vault Recovery.
The Vault recovery/asset unlock process is the same process that Guardians may have enacted multiple times for the owner — so nothing new for them to do.
3. Once the minimum number of Guardians have confirmed a Vault Unlock, the assets are transferred to the Beneficiary.
The Inheritance process is complete, and the new Beneficiary will be free to disburse the assets as specified by the Vault owner's Will or Living Trust.
The Vault12 Digital Inheritance capability is designed to ensure that all digital assets — not just cryptocurrency — that are backed up in the original Vault are passed on to the designated individual in the future.
Vault12 Digital Inheritance is part of the Vault12 app, and is now available in the App Store, Google Play, macOS, and Windows.
Download at https://vault12.com/download.
If you are a lawyer or a crypto investor please view our web seminar hosted by the Chamber of Digital Commerce, with
- Philip C. Berg, Otterbourg P. C.
- Jason Lederman, Senior Associate, Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP
- Wasim Ahmad, Chief Crypto Officer, Vault12
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Vault12 Blog
How it Works: Vault12 Digital Inheritance
Vault12 Digital Inheritance is the first solution to offer a simple, direct, and secure way for all types of investors to ensure that all of your digital assets can be accessed by future generations.
December 08 2021
Digital Inheritance: Get ready today.
Vault12 Digital Inheritance is the first solution to offer a simple, direct, and secure way to ensure cryptocurrency, NFTs and other Web3 digital assets can be inherited by future generations.
Digital Inheritance enables investors to designate an individual or a mobile device as a guardian that will inherit their entire portfolio of digital assets inside a secure digital Vault once the time comes, eliminating undue risk and the need to continually update an inventory or issue updated instructions which result in privacy leakage.
Self-Custody & Backup for Wallet Seed phrases, NFTs, and Secrets.
Designed to be used alongside traditional hardware, software, and online wallets, Vault12 helps cryptocurrency owners, professional crypto traders, and high-net-worth investors safeguard their digital assets without storing anything in the cloud or in fact, any one single location. This increases protection and decreases the risks of loss.
(Note: The Vault12 app is not a crypto wallet and does not hold cryptocurrency. It is a Vault that safeguards your wallet seed phrase and private keys, associated files for NFTs, and digital art).
The Vault12 app helps you self-custody, backup, and provide legacy inheritance for all your web3 digital assets, including NFTs, wallet seed phrases, secrets like keys, PIN codes, DAO project keys, and digital art.
Collectors, ensure your Art is protected for the future
Whether your digital art is suitable for a phone, or represents much higher resolution multimedia, make sure that you have backed up a copy in case the resource link is disrupted in the future. Digital art can easily be added to the Vault either via the mobile app or via the desktop utility. Once you have stored your artwork in your Vault, it will also benefit from inheritance once you activate that in your app.
Creators, protect your Projects.
As a creator you can use Vault12 to safeguard not just your NFT and crypto wallets, but also original digital artwork. Project creators will always have to deal with multiple wallets - inventory, treasury as well as future royalty wallets.
Vault12 safeguards your project assets, increasing protection and decreasing the risks of loss, whilst ensuring that everything is ready to go to be passed onto future generations, when the need arises.
Learn
Step-by-step guides for setting up your digital Vault and adding assets, recovering assets, inheriting and restoring Vaults. Vault12 Web3 personal security helps you recover, back up, and inherit all assets stored in your Vault including Bitcoin, Ethereum, crypto, private keys, seed phrases, wallets, NFTs and digital art.
With the latest release of Vault12, now available in both iOS App Store and Google Play we have streamlined how you can use VGT to upgrade your Vault or fund your Vault for future. Right now there is a 50% discount on all plans if you fund your Vault with VGT.
How to get the Vault12 app, create your own Digital Vault, and assign trusted Guardians to guard your Vault.