A digital-asset estate plan answers a question the rest of an estate plan can take for granted: not who inherits, but whether anyone can reach what they inherit. A bank remembers an account on the family's behalf. A blockchain remembers nothing and forgives nothing. The work is to make holdings findable, reachable, and lawfully transferable — before the person who holds them is no longer there to explain.
This is the discipline's map of digital-asset estate planning in New York, written for the family principal or founder who holds meaningful cryptocurrency, tokenized interests, or accounts that exist only online. It is a pillar rather than a checklist. Each of the five questions below has a deeper article behind it, and this piece exists to show how they fit together — to set the architecture, and then send you to the room where each part of the work is done.
Traditional wealth assumes that institutions remember on the owner's behalf. Banks track balances, brokerages report holdings, registrars confirm title, and an executor who knows an account exists can compel its disclosure. Digital assets move that responsibility back onto the owner. Access depends on keys the owner controls, and a self-custodied asset is reachable after death only if the plan made it reachable. That is the reframing the whole discipline turns on: for digital assets, access — not ownership — is the planning problem.
New York gives this work a statutory home. The Estates, Powers and Trusts Law sets out how a fiduciary may reach a person's digital assets, and a plan built in this state is built on it. What follows is general information, not legal advice; the plan that fits a given family depends on the assets, the people, and the law in force, and it should be drafted with counsel rather than assembled from logins. One point recurs throughout: the strongest digital-asset plan is the one written down while the owner is alive and able to grant it, not the one a family reconstructs afterward.
What you hold, and whether anyone can find it
The first question is the plainest and the most often skipped: does anyone other than the owner know what exists. A digital asset that no one can find is functionally lost, and an heir cannot recover holdings they never knew about. The foundation of the plan is therefore an inventory — a current record of the wallets, the exchange accounts, the tokenized interests, and the online accounts that carry value — kept in a form an executor can actually follow. The format matters less than that it is complete and that it is maintained as holdings change.
The inventory has one inviolable rule, and it is the rule that keeps the document safe to write at all: it records where access is stored, never the access itself. It names the hardware wallet in the home safe or the sealed envelope held with counsel; it does not contain the seed phrase or the private key. An inventory that holds the keys is a single document that can empty every account it lists, and it is exactly the thing a careful plan refuses to create. The record points to the credentials. It never becomes them.
What makes the inventory urgent is how many ways a digital inheritance fails when it is absent. Holdings disappear into the residue of an estate because no one knew to look for them; devices lock; an exchange winds down and takes its records with it. We set out the full taxonomy of these failures in our article on how cryptocurrency is lost at death, which is the companion to this section. The inventory is what closes the first and most common of those gaps — the asset no one knew existed.
Securing access without surrendering it
The second question is how access is held during life so that it survives death without being exposed in the meantime. This is the custody problem, and it has a built-in tension: the same secret that lets an heir recover an asset lets a thief take it. A plan that makes the keys too available defeats security; a plan that makes them too private defeats inheritance. The work is to resolve that tension deliberately rather than leave it to a sock drawer.
The instruments that resolve it are familiar to anyone who custodies seriously — hardware wallets that keep keys offline, multi-signature arrangements that require more than one party to move an asset, geographically separated backups, and, where appropriate, qualified custodians. Multi-signature succession is the structure that most directly answers the inheritance question, because it lets an owner distribute the power to recover an asset without handing any single person the power to take it. It is also where New York's particular gaps appear, and where a plan has to be drafted to the facts.
We treat the mechanics of this in our article on self-custodied crypto and multi-signature inheritance in New York — how the keys are split, who holds which share, and how a successor assembles the authority to spend without exposing the asset before it is needed. For this pillar, the point is the principle: secure access is not a single secret kept well, but a structure designed so that recovery and security are not in conflict.
Secure access is not a single secret kept well — it is a structure built so that recovery and security are not in conflict.
The authority to act
The third question is legal rather than technical: even an heir who can find the asset and reach the secret may lack the standing to make a custodian cooperate. A fiduciary — the executor of an estate, the trustee of a trust, an agent under a power of attorney — derives authority from the instrument that appointed them, not from possession of a password. A surviving spouse who signs in with the decedent's credentials is relying on a provider not to notice, not on a right the provider must honor.
New York answers this with statute. It adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act as Article 13-A of the Estates, Powers and Trusts Law, giving executors, trustees, agents, and guardians a defined route to a person's digital assets. The act turns on an order of priority — a provider's online tool governs first, the will or trust or power of attorney next, and the terms of service only when nothing else has spoken — and on a line between the record that a message existed and its actual content, which takes a higher level of consent to reach.
The drafting consequence is precise, and it is the reason this question belongs to counsel before it is needed: in the absence of a provider's online tool, the will, the trust, and the power of attorney are where enforceable authority lives, and a document silent on digital assets leaves a fiduciary at the mercy of a contract written for the living. We work through the framework in full in our article on fiduciary access to digital assets in New York. The lesson it carries is the one this section turns on — the credential is a convenience; the authority is the thing that matters.
An online tool beats the will; the will beats the terms of service. The credential is a convenience — the authority is the thing that matters.
The instruments that carry it
The fourth question is which documents hold the plan. A standard will does not automatically reach digital assets, and a will is the wrong place for the sensitive part of the plan in any event, because a will becomes part of the public probate record. Listing a private key in a will is the rare drafting error that can lose the asset outright. The will should name the fiduciary's authority over digital assets and point to where access is held; it should never carry the access itself.
A trust does what a will cannot. It keeps the disposition private, it lets a trustee hold and manage the assets across a transition rather than only distribute them, and it can be drafted to the particular demands of this asset class. One drafting point deserves naming here: a trustee is ordinarily bound by the prudent investor rule, which does not sit comfortably with a concentrated, volatile holding, so a trust meant to hold cryptocurrency should say expressly that the trustee may do so — and the transfer of the assets into the trust should be documented, including the trustee's acceptance, rather than assumed.
We set out how these instruments fit together in our articles on holding digital assets in trust — custody and succession and on estate planning beyond wills, which place digital assets inside the larger architecture of a family's plan. For this pillar, the point is that the instruments are not interchangeable: the will grants authority and stays public, the trust carries the assets and stays private, and the power of attorney keeps an online-only account reachable during incapacity rather than only after death.
Value, tax, and a volatile asset
The fifth question is what the holdings are worth and what the transfer costs. Cryptocurrency is treated as property for federal tax purposes, so its value in an estate is its fair market value at the date of death, established from exchange data that can differ meaningfully from one venue to another at the same moment. That date-of-death value also becomes the heir's new cost basis — the step-up that can reduce or remove the capital-gains tax on appreciation during the owner's life, which is one reason transferring an appreciated asset at death is treated differently from giving it away during life.
New York adds its own layer. The state imposes an estate tax with its own exemption threshold, separate from the federal one, and it reaches gifts made within three years of death. A volatile asset complicates both the valuation and the planning, because a holding can move sharply between the moment a plan is written and the moment it is administered, and an executor has a limited election to value the estate at a later date when assets have declined. These are questions for counsel and a tax adviser working from the actual numbers, not from a general rule.
We treat valuation, the step-up, the New York thresholds, and the volatility problem in our article on cryptocurrency in a New York estate — valuation, tax, and reporting. Taken together with the four questions before it, this is the whole architecture: find the asset, secure its access, grant the authority to reach it, carry it in the right instrument, and account for its value. A plan that answers all five is a plan an heir can actually execute. A plan that answers four leaves the assets on a ledger no one can move.
Find the asset, secure its access, grant the authority to reach it, carry it in the right instrument, and account for its value. A plan that answers four of the five leaves the assets on a ledger no one can move.