What you need to know about Crypto Inheritance Planning

Unlike traditional assets, crypto assets need to be managed differently from an inheritance standpoint. In fact, the only similarity between traditional and digital assets is that you must maintain an update inventory of them. The main challenges associated with crypto inheritance are:

1. Inventory of crypto assets: You must carefully maintain an inventory of crypto assets. This means backing up seed phrases and/or private keys of all crypto wallets, across all blockchains, and all types of devices or places where those wallets exist, e.g., mobile phones, hardware wallets, cloud, and paper backups. Any assets that are not documented in your backup are liable to be lost.
2. Privacy of all information:You must ensure absolute privacy of the backup information. Anyone with access to private keys or seed phrases will be able to compromise the funds. This includes ensuring that any documentation left with your lawyers is strongly protected.
3. Critical Points of Failure: You must eliminate personal devices and cloud services as critical points of failure. The most significant risk in inheritance is reliance on individual devices, which can be stolen, lost, or damaged. The second risk is the dependency on one or more cloud servers. We have seen what happens when business relationships between cloud partners face legal challenges, or cloud services are disrupted by malware or bad software updates.
4. Technical Beneficiary awareness: As the varieties of crypto assets expand over time, staying aware of them becomes important. You will need to designate someone technically fluent in this area. They may not be the ultimate beneficiary; however, you will need to trust them to distribute the assets per your wishes.
5. Trust & Estate Attorney: You must consult with experienced lawyers who are well versed in inheritance of crypto assets. A great resource is "A Practical Guide to Estate Administration and Crypto Assets" by Richard Marshall from Hill Dickinson LLP.

Why Choose Vault12 Guard for Crypto Inheritance Management?

Vault12 is the pioneer of crypto inheritance management, and Vault12 Guard is the first solution to offer a simple, direct, and secure way for all types of investors to ensure that all of their crypto assets can be accessed by future generations.

Consider that:

• 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.
• A simple and direct approach like Vault12 Guard 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.

1. Inventory of crypto assets: The first step in inheritance is backing up all your crypto wallets. Vault12 makes this as easy as possible - despite the appalling lack of usability in current hardware and software wallets. There will always be new crypto assets on new blockchains, and Vault12 can manage any crypto asset on any device, on any blockchain, now and in the future.
2. Privacy of all information:Your crypto assets are protected via a Secure Element (Secure Enclave in iOS, and Strongbox on Google Android phones), and the encryption used is Quantum-safe. With this security, no one knows what assets are part of your Vault.
3. No Critical Points of Failure: No assets are stored locally, no assets are stored in any cloud, and no assets are stored at Vault12. There are no devices to lose, no paper backups, and no need to manually give encrypted assets to a subset of people. The Vault12 system is decentralized, making it a difficult target for hackers — and in fact for any type of failure.
4. Confidence in a Technical Beneficiary: With Vault12 you get to designate a trusted technical beneficiary. Should you change your mind, you can swap them out at any time.
5. Flexibility in Trust & Estate Attorney: While regulations and guidelines for inheritance planning can vary from state to state and country to country, Vault12 Guard is designed to be independent of whatever legal framework you choose to govern the inheritance of your assets. Vault12 Guard is simply a transfer mechanism that ensures all your crypto assets are passed from your control to a designated technical beneficiary.

Key Product Features of Vault12 Guard

The Vault12 platform provides your crypto assets with the highest security and strong backup resilience. Vault12 Guard 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 update an inventory continually or to issue updated instructions.

• Unified Digital Vault: Use Vault12 Guard Digital Vault to store digital assets, including cryptocurrency, financial login information, legal documents, medical records, and more.
• Guardian Network: The Vault is protected by your network of Guardians: friends, family, and/or business associates — people that you know and trust.
• Beneficiary Designation: Designate a beneficiary from your chosen Guardians. A declaration is then digitally signed, and can be emailed to other parties, such as lawyers.
• Trigger-Based Access: As a Vault Owner, you can configure a legally-defined trigger such as incapacitation or death. When the trigger occurs, the beneficiary indicates they are ready to access the digital assets. Assets are unlocked and transferred to the beneficiary only when a designated number of Guardians approve the request.
• Preemptive Veto Option: 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.

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