When you are putting together your estate plan, how do you account for your digital assets (crypto, bank passwords, and other sensitive documents)? How do you make sure they can be safely passed down to your heirs, while at the same time making sure they are safe in the present? How do you keep backups?

Your heirs and estate planner may be willing to hold on to some types of sensitive documents (bank passwords, deeds, etc) but when it comes to crypto, chances are they don’t want to manage it any more than you do! Many estate planners refuse to take custody of crypto due to the liability it brings, and your family members don’t want to be responsible if they mess something up and accidentally lose your crypto nest egg.

Crypto presents unique problems for estate planning, since in order to access it one must have the private key. But also, anybody with the private key can access the crypto, even if they shouldn’t be “authorized”.

The solution to this problem is to store your crypto in an encrypted vault. You can give copies of the vault to family members or estate planners without adding increased risk as they do not have the passphrase to open the vault. You can then take your passphrase and split it into multiple parts (such as giving one part to each heir) so that the parts can be re-assembled in the event of your death. If somebody loses their copy of the vault or their portion of the passphrase, it’s no problem because the vault and the full passphrase were never in the same place at the same time.

A TC vault enables you to:

  • Easily store your crypto and other sensitive documents in an encrypted folder (your vault)
  • Store backups of your vault with other parties without needing to trust them, since they can’t decrypt it. This also means they are happy to store the vault as it introduces no liability to them.
  • Split your vault passphrase (which is used to decrypt your vault) among multiple parties. This means your passphrase can be re-assembled when and how you specify (such as upon your death). You specify how many parts it is split into, who gets those parts, and how many parts are needed to re-assemble the full passphrase