Your Crypto Doesn’t Die With You, But It Can Get Lost Forever: Estate Planning for Digital Wallets

If you own Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other cryptocurrency, you already know the appeal: no bank in the middle, no one else holding the keys, complete control. That same independence becomes a serious liability the moment you’re gone. Unlike a checking account, there’s no customer service line your family can call. There’s no “forgot my password” option. If nobody knows how to access your digital wallet, the money isn’t tied up in probate. It’s gone, permanently, with no court order or legal authority able to bring it back.

Why Crypto Breaks the Old Estate Planning Playbook

Traditional estate planning assumes an institution sits between your assets and your heirs. A bank has records. A brokerage has a paper trail. Even real estate has a recorded deed. Cryptocurrency has none of that by design. Ownership is proven entirely through a private key or a seed phrase, typically a string of twelve to twenty-four words. Whoever holds that phrase controls the asset. Whoever doesn’t, doesn’t.

This creates a strange paradox for people building an estate plan. You want your executor or trustee to eventually access the wallet, but you don’t want to write your seed phrase into a will, because wills become public record during probate in Florida. Put your recovery phrase in a public court filing and you’ve handed it to anyone who bothers to look.

Where Florida Law Fits In

Florida has adopted its version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, found in Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes. This law gives personal representatives, trustees, and agents under a power of attorney the legal authority to access a person’s digital assets, including cryptocurrency, but only if the estate planning documents specifically grant that authority. Generic language authorizing a fiduciary to “manage all assets” typically isn’t considered specific enough for custodians and platforms to rely on.

In practice, this means your will, trust, and power of attorney need explicit provisions naming digital assets and cryptocurrency specifically, and granting your fiduciary the legal right to access, manage, transfer, or liquidate them. Without that language, even a fiduciary who somehow finds your private keys may run into resistance from exchanges or face uncertainty about their legal footing.

Practical Steps That Actually Protect Your Holdings

The legal authority solves half the problem. The other half is purely technical: making sure someone can actually get to the wallet when the time comes. A few steps we walk clients through:

• Create a full inventory of every wallet, exchange account, and holding, updated whenever you add new assets
• Draft a separate, private memorandum with access instructions, referenced in your trust but stored securely apart from it
• Store seed phrases on physical, durable media (many people use metal backups) in a safe deposit box or similarly secure location, never as a photo on your phone or a note in your email
• Name a trustee or personal representative who is comfortable with wallets, exchanges, and multi-signature setups, or at minimum knows to seek out someone who is
• Update your trust or will with express digital asset and cryptocurrency authorization language tied to Chapter 740

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Industry estimates suggest a meaningful share of all Bitcoin in existence is already permanently lost, much of it tied to owners who died or misplaced their keys without leaving any instructions behind. That’s not a hypothetical risk. It’s the default outcome for anyone who treats crypto as separate from their broader estate plan.

If you hold cryptocurrency and haven’t addressed it directly in your estate planning documents, now is the time. We help clients build digital asset provisions that satisfy Florida law while keeping sensitive access information private and secure. Contact the Palm Beach County estate planning attorneys at Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll to make sure your crypto holdings actually reach the people you intend them for.

Source:

leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/2025/Title36/Chapter740/