Digital Assets in the Estate Plan — What Still Does Not Work, and What Has Started To

Connecticut adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — codified at Conn. Gen. Stat. § 45a-334a et seq. — in 2019. Four years later, digital-asset estate planning has matured into a workable subfield for most categories of digital assets. Online accounts, social media profiles, email archives, and cloud-based storage are reachable through the RUFADAA framework, imperfectly but serviceably. The crypto-wallet succession question is a different matter. It is still largely unsolved by traditional estate planning, and the practical tools available to fiduciaries continue to lag the assets themselves.

What works: RUFADAA and the standard digital-asset inventory

For the conventional digital-asset categories, the RUFADAA framework now does approximately what it was designed to do. A fiduciary — executor, trustee, conservator — can obtain access to a decedent's email, social media, cloud storage, and online accounts, subject to the statute's consent hierarchy and the service provider's terms.

The consent hierarchy matters: the user's express instructions (via the provider's online tool or a qualifying written directive) control first, followed by the provider's default settings, followed by the statutory defaults. Most sophisticated estate plans now include a digital-asset provision in the will or trust that invokes the statute and grants the fiduciary explicit access authority. Without that provision, the fiduciary is defaulted to the provider's own policies, which vary widely and which occasionally produce litigation.

The operational reality is still more difficult than the statute suggests. Service providers have implemented the RUFADAA consent framework unevenly. Google's Inactive Account Manager is a mature and well-documented tool. Apple's Legacy Contact is newer but functional. Facebook and Instagram have memorialization procedures that work. But many smaller providers, particularly in categories like password managers, niche social platforms, and specialized business tools, either have not implemented RUFADAA-compatible procedures or have opaque processes that require court orders to navigate. For a Connecticut decedent with a typical digital footprint — email, banking portals, a dozen shopping accounts, a couple of social media profiles — the fiduciary's path to access is manageable but time-intensive.

What does not work: cryptocurrency and self-custody wallets

Cryptocurrency is a different problem category. Here the issue is not the statutory framework — RUFADAA covers digital assets broadly, including crypto — but the technical reality of self-custody wallets and seed phrases.

If a client holds cryptocurrency on a major exchange (Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini) with standard account credentials, the exchange's decedent procedures apply and the fiduciary can recover the assets, subject to the same operational frictions as any other online account. Exchange custody is, in this sense, closer to a brokerage account than to cash in a mattress.

If a client holds cryptocurrency in a self-custody wallet — whether a hardware wallet (Ledger, Trezor) or a software wallet on a personal computer — the assets are recoverable only by a party who holds the private key or seed phrase. There is no customer service department, no recovery process, and no legal mechanism for producing the private key if it is not written down somewhere the fiduciary can find. A seed phrase lost with the decedent is, for practical purposes, the asset gone.

Estate planning around self-custody wallets is therefore fundamentally a physical-security problem layered onto an information-security problem. The question is: where is the seed phrase stored, how does the fiduciary know where to find it, and how is it protected against unauthorized access during the grantor's lifetime?

What we are actually doing

For clients with meaningful cryptocurrency holdings, we have settled into a few practical approaches.

Multi-signature wallets for larger holdings. For clients with crypto assets above, roughly, $250,000 in value, a multi-signature wallet structure — where two of three private keys are required to move funds, with the keys held by separate parties or in separate secure locations — provides both lifetime security and post-death recoverability. The drafting challenge is structuring the key-holder arrangement so that the fiduciary can reconstruct the signing authority at death without exposing the keys during the client's lifetime. We typically work with specialized crypto-custody firms or with the client's primary financial advisor (if equipped) to handle the operational layer.

Sealed instructions in safe deposit boxes. For smaller holdings, a sealed envelope in a safe deposit box — containing seed phrases, wallet addresses, and exchange credentials — remains the workable low-tech solution. The envelope should be accompanied by clear instructions for the fiduciary, and the safe deposit box should be titled in a way that the fiduciary can access it without undue process (this usually means the client's revocable trust, not the client individually).

Explicit fiduciary powers language. Every will or revocable trust we draft for a client with any digital assets now includes explicit fiduciary powers language addressing digital assets, invoking RUFADAA, and granting the fiduciary authority to engage third-party digital-asset recovery specialists if necessary. The cost of that boilerplate is minimal; the cost of not having it, when a fiduciary needs it, can be significant.

The inventory problem

The most practical estate-planning deliverable I now prepare for clients with digital assets is a maintained inventory. Not a list of passwords — those change, and leaving a password list in an estate plan is its own problem — but a list of accounts, asset categories, and access paths. The inventory should be reviewed and updated annually, typically at the same time as beneficiary-designation reviews.

The inventory answers a specific question: at the client's death, what does the fiduciary need to know to identify and access the digital assets? Not how to log in — that is a separate, more dangerous document — but where to look and whom to contact.

A note on AI and emerging asset types

Digital assets are a moving target. Five years ago, "digital assets" meant email and photos; today it includes crypto, DAOs, NFTs, tokenized real estate, and a growing list of emerging asset types. Five years from now it will include categories that do not exist yet. The estate planning response to this is less about specific asset types and more about drafting and structure: the fiduciary powers language should be broad enough to cover unforeseen categories, the inventory should be maintained, and the structure should be flexible enough to absorb new asset types as the client's portfolio changes.

The T&E group handles digital-asset estate planning as a component of our broader trust and estate practice. For clients with significant cryptocurrency holdings or unusual digital-asset portfolios, we typically bring in outside specialists for the custody and technical work while we handle the legal structure.