A digital inheritance plan, why care about setting one up?

What is a digital inheritance plan?

A digital inheritance plan manages the transfer of digital assets from someone who passed away to his/her heirs.

It’s some kind of inventory of all your digital possessions and property and it explains how you intend to pass it on to the next generation.

A big difference with a traditional inheritance plan is that there’s no need for an intermediary to manage a digital inheritance plan.

You can easily decentralize your digital inheritance plan and a smart contract on the blockchain can manage it.

In that case, your inheritance plan also only exists digitally.

Setting up a digital inheritance plan is a way to protect your (digital) legacy without the need of using middlemen or having to trust someone.

What assets can be included in a digital inheritance plan?

Digital assets do not only contain cryptocurrencies. They can also include online accounts and passwords and any other form of text or digital data.

Different types of digital assets:

• Private keys and seed phrases to access your Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
• Data from all your devices: computers, external hard drives, USB sticks, tablets, smartphones, digital cameras,, …
• All data stored on your hard drives or in your cloud
• Email accounts
• Social media accounts
• Domain names
• …

Why care about setting up a digital inheritance plan?

When a person dies, he or she has more to his/her name than physical assets or property. The person’s online identity also dies.

Think about social media accounts, email addresses, investments, bank accounts, crypto wallets, NFTs, …

After a death, family members are often left with piles of accounts on social media without access to them.

Or what happens if family members do get hold of the required passwords, but there’s no trustworthy supervisor? Or no clear authority to access the deceased accounts and funds? One family member can steal or hide everything without the rest even noticing.

Without a safe digital inheritance plan, your descendants may no longer have access to your digital wallets, photos, videos, or certain online accounts.

Your digital inheritance plan gives you the power to keep managing your assets even after your death.

A decentralized digital inheritance plan

The first thing that comes to mind is to appeal to a notary and leave access to your Bitcoin and other digital assets directly in your will.

Which, in theory, is possible.

For example, it is possible to create a document on which you write down the private key of your Bitcoin wallet. You can then have this included in your will.

You can also choose to keep this document in a safe. Access to the safe is then under the control of the notary, who ensures that everyone included in the will is present at the time the safe is opened.

Even without a notary you can make certain arrangements. You can hire a lawyer who will hold the instructions for your beneficiaries on how to access your Bitcoin after you died.

But, how safe is this?

What if someone gets hold of your private key by taking a picture of the document?

What if the person you’re giving the responsibility to take care of your will isn’t that trustworthy after all?

There should be better and safer ways to give you a peace of mind, right?

Protecting your legacy in a trustless way

The most secure solution is to create a digital inheritance plan through Inheriti®. It’s the only 100% decentralized solution to digital inheritance and it has multiple patents in different jurisdictions around the world.

Inheriti® makes it possible to transfer sensitive data after your death, without anyone else being able to access it in advance or without your consent.

Simply said: Inheriti® does this (amongst other things) by encrypting and splitting data into secret shares.

Important to note here is that you never directly leave your Bitcoin in your will or inheritance plan. Instead you leave your private key, the access to the digital wallet where your assets are located on the blockchain.

The necessary data to access your Bitcoin wallet (guidelines, private key, …) is encrypted and split into shares. Your beneficiaries then keep the data on a cold storage device such as our own SafeKey.

Recovering your legacy

Beneficiaries can recover the data by putting all the encrypted shares together via Inheriti®. Inheriti® will do the rest.

If you want more information, or if you want to create your own inheritance plan and leave Bitcoin in a will, be sure to check out all features of Inheriti®.

This gives you a secure solution where heirs can’t scam each other. Even without the need or involvement of a notary, banker or lawyer.

Isn’t that what crypto and decentralization is all about? To remove all middlemen?

The user-friendly user interface and the transparency of your inheritance plan make it that Inheriti® offers you a great and reliable standard to manage the inheritance of your legacy yourself.

Click here to learn more about our patented solution: Inheriti® »