Meet Vault12 at the Mansion House Summit in London, September 13, 2024.

Digital Inheritance with Vault12.
Vault12 Blog

Digital Inheritance with Vault12.

How to implement a comprehensive Digital Inheritance solution with Vault12.

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.

  • 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:

Digital Inheritance: How it works

1. 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.

1. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

2. 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.
  • 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 Restore.
The Vault restore/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. Restoring Assets

  • 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



https://www.linkedin.com/company/vault12
https://twitter.com/_vault12_
Discover More

Featured Articles

avatar-icon

Vault12

Vault12 is the pioneer in crypto inheritance and backup. The company was founded in 2015 to provide a way to enable everyday crypto customers to add a legacy contact to their cry[to wallets. The Vault12 Guard solution is blockchain-independent, runs on any mobile device with biometric security, and is available in Apple and Google app stores.

star-background

Backup and Inheritance for Bitcoin

vault12-guard
Get the Vault12 app onto your phone
QR code Vault12 Crypto/NFT InheritanceDownload Vault12 on App StoreDownload Vault12 on Google Play
Vault12 app mockup
Scroll down
Close

Vault12 Product Demo

Get The Vault12 App Onto Your Phone

Download Vault12 on App StoreDownload Vault12 on Google Play
You will lose your Bitcoin and other crypto when you die...

You will lose your Bitcoin and other crypto when you die...

...unless you set up Crypto Inheritance Management today.

It's simple—if you don't worry about it, nobody else will—not your software or hardware wallets vendors, not your exchanges, not your wealth managers. So you have to think about how to protect the generational wealth you have created and reduce the risks around passing that wealth on to your family and heirs. What are the challenges with crypto inheritance?

  • Crypto Wallets are difficult to use and do not offer crypto inheritance management. In fact, most of them tell you to write down your seed phrase on a piece of paper which is practically useless.
  • Some people back up their wallet seed phrases or private keys on paper, local devices like hardware wallets or USBs, or in the cloud - all of these options have severe drawbacks from hacking, to accidental loss, to loss of cloud services. No one wants that to happen to their crypto generational wealth.
  • Software wallets operate on specific blockchains, yet your crypto assets span multiple blockchains, for inheritance to work, you must be able to manage inheritance across every blockchain - now and forever.
Vault12 is the pioneer in crypto inheritance management, watch our explainer video or Inheritance demo today.
Screenshot of Vault12 Guard apps - Add an Asset screen

Crypto Inheritance Management: Get ready today

Vault12 is the pioneer in Crypto Inheritance Management that delivering an easy-to-use and secure method for assigning a legacy contact to your crypto wallets. This enables you to pass on your wallet seed phrases and private keys — including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) — to future generations. Designed for everyday people, and strong enough for Crypto OGs.

This innovative, decentralized system enables users to appoint a person or mobile device as Guardian. The designated guardian is entrusted to protect the user's comprehensive collection of wallet seed phrases and private keys, safely stored within a decentralized digital Vault. No information is stored on cloud servers, or Vault12 servers and nothing is stored on local devices making it less of a target.

The Decentralized approach reduces points of failure and removes the necessity for regularly revising wallet inventories or modifying instructions for your lawyers, often leading to privacy breaches. It is the best way to preserve crypto generational wealth.

Screenshot of Vault12 Guard app - Adding data into the Vault

Take the first step and back up your crypto wallets.

Designed to be used alongside traditional hardware and software crypto wallets, Vault12 Guard helps cryptocurrency owners back up their wallet seed phrases and private keys (assets) without storing anything in the cloud or any single location. This increases protection and decreases the risks of loss. Making sure you have an up to date back up is the first step in crypto inheritance management.

The Vault12 Guard app enables secure decentralized backups and provides inheritance for all your seed phrases and private keys across any blockchain, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, ERC-20, and other crypto wallets.

Note: For anyone unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, Vault12 refers to wallet seed phrases and private keys as assets, crypto assets, and digital assets. The Vault12 Guard app includes a software wallet that works alongside your digital Vault. The primary purpose of this is to guard your Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH) wallet seed phrases, private keys, and other essential data, now and for future generations.

Add Inheritance for your crypto.