This might sound somewhat gloomy but it’s a fact of life. Human beings are not immortal and have to die someday, anyday and anytime for that matter , it could happen suddenly and most at times nobody is really ready to pass on.
That is why people make wills. Cryptocurrency investment is the newest form of investment that is taking over the world. As at the time of writing this post cryptocurrency market capitalization is about 100 billion dollars and growing, with access to the internet anybody can invest in cryptocurrency and it doesn’t need a huge capital base to start,you can even start an investment in crytocurrency without money, perfect example is steem.
WHAT HAPPENS TO A CRYPTOCURRENCY INVESTMENT IN EVENT OF SUDDEN DEMISE
This post is inspired by a true life happening, in a cryptocurrency whatsapp group someone asked for help on how to recover a late elder brother’s cryptocurrency portfolio that ran into thousands of dollars, the deceased was the sole breadwinner of the family and was involved in a fatal accident that took his life. Most of his investments are in cryptocurrency because he was a very active trader and its all probably lost now as the family have no idea on how to access that part of his investment.
This got me thinking, how does one guarantee that his/her investment in cryptocurrency benefits those that it’s supposed to in a situation like this. Main stream traditional investments in companies, real estates,insurance etc have documents to back up investments and can be transferred to next of kin if the primary investor is no more. A person can make a will detailing what investment goes to who and with this, one is to a very large extent guaranteed that his/her investment will be passed on as intended. So what about crypto assets ?
I don’t know if they are various solutions to this out there but the one thing that came to mind was encrypting a file with all the digital assets, relevant online accounts and their corresponding passwords and sending it to the next of kin’s email and then leaving the password of the encrypted file in a will with the lawyer just as one would do with offline investments.
I would love to get more options on this, please drop a comment if you have a suggestion.