An estimated $140 billion in Bitcoin alone is permanently inaccessible — lost to forgotten passwords, missing seed phrases, and owners who died without leaving any record of how to access their holdings. That number grows every year. And cryptocurrency is only part of the picture. Online bank accounts, brokerage platforms, social media profiles, email archives, and subscription services all exist in a digital layer that most estate plans completely ignore.
The problem with digital assets and traditional estate planning
Traditional estate planning was designed for a world of physical assets — houses, bank accounts with paper statements, certificates in filing cabinets. A trust or will can name beneficiaries for a brokerage account. It cannot hand them the password to access it. It can direct that your estate be distributed according to your wishes. It cannot tell your family that you held $40,000 in a hardware wallet in your desk drawer.
The gap between what traditional estate planning covers and what actually constitutes your digital life grows wider every year. Most people have more value tied up in digital accounts than they realize.
What counts as a digital asset?
Digital assets fall into several categories:
Financial digital assets
- Cryptocurrency holdings — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other tokens held in wallets or on exchanges
- Online-only bank accounts — neobanks like Chime, SoFi, or Marcus that have no physical branch
- Digital brokerage accounts — Robinhood, Webull, and similar platforms
- PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App balances
- Reward points and airline miles with cash value
Accounts and access
- Email accounts — often the master key to every other account through password resets
- Password manager accounts — which may hold credentials for dozens of other services
- Cloud storage — Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox — which may hold years of important documents and photos
- Domain names and websites — which may have commercial value or contain important records
Social media and identity
- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok profiles
- YouTube channels — which may generate ongoing revenue
- Substack, Patreon, and other creator platform accounts
Subscriptions and services
- Streaming services — Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music
- Software licenses — Adobe, Microsoft 365
- Professional tools and SaaS subscriptions
What happens to each type when you die
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is unique among digital assets because access is entirely credential-based. There is no customer service department that can restore access to a hardware wallet. There is no bank to call. If your heirs do not have your seed phrase or private key your holdings are permanently inaccessible. No court order, no legal authority, and no amount of money can recover funds from a wallet without the credentials.
Exchange-held cryptocurrency — coins held at Coinbase, Kraken, or similar platforms — is slightly more recoverable. Most major exchanges have estate claim processes. Your executor can typically claim exchange-held cryptocurrency by providing a death certificate, letters testamentary, and completing the exchange's estate claim process. This can take months.
Online bank accounts
Online banks and fintech platforms vary widely in their estate processes. Most will freeze the account upon notification of death and require probate letters before releasing funds to an executor. If the account is not listed in your estate plan your executor may not know it exists.
Social media accounts
Each platform has its own policy:
Facebook and Instagram allow a designated legacy contact to memorialize an account or request removal. Without a designated legacy contact the process requires submitting a special request with a death certificate — and memorialization rather than transfer is the most common outcome.
Google has an Inactive Account Manager that allows you to designate what happens to your Google account — including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos — if you become inactive. Without this set up Google will eventually delete the account.
Twitter allows family members to request deactivation of a deceased person's account. The content is not transferable.
LinkedIn allows family to request account closure. There is no legacy contact or memorialization option.
Email accounts
Email accounts are often the most important digital asset to plan for because they are the recovery mechanism for every other account. If your family cannot access your email they may be unable to reset passwords for financial accounts, access cloud storage, or manage ongoing subscriptions. Most email providers require a death certificate and legal documentation to provide access — and some will not provide access at all, defaulting instead to account deletion.
The California Digital Assets Law
California has enacted legislation addressing digital assets in estate planning. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — adopted in California as Probate Code Section 870 et seq. — gives fiduciaries including executors, trustees, and agents under a power of attorney the legal authority to access digital assets, subject to the terms of service of each platform and any directions left by the account holder.
The practical implication is that a California trust or power of attorney can explicitly authorize your successor trustee or agent to access and manage your digital assets. Without this authorization your trustee may have the legal right under California law but face practical barriers from individual platform terms of service.
Why most digital assets go undocumented
The reason most estate plans ignore digital assets is simple: the process of documenting them is manual, time-consuming, and feels less urgent than drafting the primary documents. Most estate planning attorneys do not ask their clients to produce a comprehensive digital asset inventory. Most clients do not volunteer it.
The result is that families routinely discover accounts they did not know existed — or worse, suspect that accounts existed and have no way to find or access them.
What a digital asset plan should include
A comprehensive digital asset inventory documents:
- Every financial account accessible only online — institution name, account type, approximate value
- Cryptocurrency holdings — wallet type, storage method, approximate value, and crucially — where recovery information is stored
- Every email account — provider and the role it plays as a recovery account for other services
- Cloud storage locations — where important documents, photos, and files are kept
- Social media accounts and your preferences for each — memorialized, deleted, or transferred
- Domain names and websites — registrar, hosting provider, and any commercial value
- Subscriptions worth cancelling — to avoid ongoing charges to the estate
The inventory should be stored securely and its location — not its contents — should be documented in your trust or with your successor trustee. Your successor trustee needs to know the inventory exists and where to find it. They do not need the credentials themselves until the time comes.
A note on password storage
Security professionals universally recommend against storing passwords in estate planning documents or in any document that is shared with multiple people or stored for extended periods. Credentials change. Documents do not update automatically. A password stored in a trust document today may be outdated in three years.
The better approach is to use a password manager — 1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass — and document how to access the password manager itself. One master credential provides access to everything else. The master credential and recovery kit for the password manager should be stored securely — a fireproof safe, a safety deposit box, or a sealed envelope with your attorney — and its location documented for your successor trustee.
Digital assets and your Logan plan
Logan's digital asset inventory lets you document every category of digital asset in one place — financial accounts, cryptocurrency, social media, email, subscriptions, and files. Note fields are encrypted at rest. The inventory lives alongside your trust and will documents in your vault, and you can share vault access with your successor trustee when the time comes.