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If something happened to you, could your family access your crypto?
As millions invest in digital assets, inheritance planning remains a critical gap, leaving families locked out and billions at risk.
- PUBLISHED: Thu 22 Jan 2026, 1:03 PM
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My dad never spoke of how much money he had or where it was, or how it was invested. For years he just told my brother and I the same thing: “There’s an envelope on my desk.”
My dad had an accident in 2024 at the age of 80 and sustained a head injury that he would not recover from. And just like he said, everything was there in that envelope: not only his wishes should he not be able to make his own medical decisions — essential to avoid painful guesswork and a huge relief to us — but account numbers, contact names and amounts, all handwritten and neatly laid out.
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It wasn’t until we began dealing with his estate, which was simple by any standard, that we realised how complicated all this legacy stuff really is. And we realised that we need to get organised with our finances and find a way to communicate to each other about them if the worst happens.
When it comes to crypto and blockchain investing, which is many times more complicated than the institutional oversight of traditional finance, it appears that a shocking number of people haven’t done that. As the space has evolved, inheritance planning has been revealed as a major structural gap — one that is getting harder to ignore.
According to the cold-storage system Ledger, up to 4 million Bitcoin, or 18 per cent of total supply, are inaccessible due to lost keys for a variety of reasons, including death without inheritance planning. In the US, a VanEck analyst using Bank of America data estimated that up to $6 trillion could enter the crypto market through inheritance in the next 20 years. This is a “billions” problem in the macro, and painful and upsetting on the family level.
It doesn’t just have to be crypto: any digital asset without a traditional set of human gatekeepers is vulnerable if your family doesn’t know about it. There is nothing worse than the lingering feeling that something big in your life is vulnerable, and so many investors have it. In 2023, a survey of 10,000 crypto owners using estate planning service DGLegacy found that the majority hadn’t made any plans, and were “very worried” their families would be lost when it comes to finding or accessing their assets if something were to happen to them.
I know my brother, like most people, absolutely would be. I’ve thought about the “envelope on my desk”, but in this case, that comes with a world of confusion and it’s just not secure — or fair. I’ve considered nominating a savvy individual who, for a fee, could walk him through the retrieval process. But I only know two people who might do this, and I think it’s too much to ask of them.
There are global services like Casa, a US-based firm that’s been focused on secure self-custody and inheritance since 2017. Companies like DGLegacy, Legacy Suite and Everplans have varying options for handling digital inheritances and asset transfer. A range of other players are stepping in with various options, some of them beginner-friendly.
According to a report on the state of crypto ownership by the digital currency gateway Triple A, 562 million people, or 6.8 per cent of the population, owned cryptocurrency in 2024. The UAE had the highest ownership rates, at 25.3 per cent of the population: meaning millions of dirhams worth of digital assets sitting unclaimed. It still boggles my mind that so many of the legacy options are third-party; that most crypto exchanges and wallets haven’t yet dealt with this.
Amir Tabch, CEO of the VARA-registered exchange OFZA, sees this not just as a financial oversight, but as a structural flaw in the blockchain ecosystem itself. Among the solutions they are building right into their system is an embedded nomination function. Nomination data is kept private and cryptographic integrity is maintained, all while digital assets are seen — and treated — as part of a full wealth plan.
Like anything, this space is evolving and shifting so fast, it’s hard to know what will be here or how things will even work in the coming years. It’s really easy to put this off, and to tell myself that I don’t have enough to worry about it, or that I won’t be here and it won’t matter. But having experienced the way my dad took the time to make the end of his life easier for us, I know that is how I want to care for my family, too.
Do you have a question or a tip or a topic you’d like covered? Reach out at cryptochroniclescoverage@gmail.com
