Cryptocurrency does not pass to your family the way a bank account does. There is no branch to call and no form to sign. Whoever holds the keys holds the coins, and a will that names a beneficiary but reveals nothing about access leaves your heirs locked out. Putting crypto in your will the right way is the work of closing that gap before it opens.
This is the practical companion to a cluster of articles on digital assets at death, and its job is to tell you what to actually do. The firm has written elsewhere about the deeper problems — how coins are lost forever when custody fails, in our article on cryptocurrency lost at death, and how a holding is valued and taxed once someone dies, in our article on cryptocurrency estate valuation. This one assumes the stakes are high and walks through the steps of a cryptocurrency estate plan that holds together: the document, the inventory behind it, the authority that lets a fiduciary act, the structures that hold the assets, and the access instructions that deliver at the right moment.
Two ideas run underneath every step. The first is that the will and the secrets must stay apart. A will that goes through probate becomes a public court record, so a private key written into it is a private key published to the world. The second is that naming a beneficiary is not the same as enabling one. Your nephew can be named to receive your holdings in plain language and still never reach a single coin, because the law that lets him receive property and the technology that lets him control it are two different things, and a plan has to satisfy both. Most of the work below exists to keep those two ideas from being violated.
This article is general information for a New York reader, not legal or tax advice. The right plan turns on your own holdings, how they are custodied, your family, and the law in force when you act, and it must be drafted with counsel rather than assembled from a guide. Tax specifics are kept general here on purpose and belong with counsel and a tax adviser working from your actual numbers. One theme recurs throughout and is worth stating now: in crypto estate planning, the document is the smallest part of the job, and the inventory, the authority, and the access instructions behind it are where a plan succeeds or fails.
Why the secrets never go in the will itself
Begin with the single rule that protects everything else: a private key, a seed phrase, or an exchange password never belongs in the will, or in any document headed for probate. The reason is structural rather than cautious. When a person dies owning probate assets in their own name, the will is filed with the Surrogate's Court — the New York court that handles wills and estates — and once filed it is a public record that anyone can read. A seed phrase written into that document is, in effect, posted on a courthouse wall, and the holding it controls can be drained the moment the filing is open.
The same logic reaches further than the will. It reaches any place where a secret and a public process can meet — a key recited in an affidavit, a password pasted into a court exhibit, a recovery phrase attached to a filing without thinking. The principle to carry through the whole plan is that the instrument the law touches and the secret the technology guards must stay in separate worlds. The will can say that you own digital assets and who is to receive them; it must not say how to take control of them. That separation is the spine of every step that follows.
What the will should contain instead is direction and a pointer. It can state, in plain language, that you hold cryptocurrency and other digital assets, that they pass to named people or into a trust, and that your fiduciary is to consult a separate, private inventory — described next — to locate and reach them. The will does the legal work of routing ownership; the inventory, kept out of the public record, does the practical work of access. Drawing that line correctly at the start is what lets the rest of the plan be both effective and safe.
A probated will is a public record — a seed phrase written into it is a seed phrase posted on a courthouse wall.
Keep a separate, secure inventory the plan can point to
If the secrets cannot live in the will, they have to live somewhere your fiduciary can reach when the time comes, and that somewhere is a separate inventory. The inventory is a private document, kept outside the public record, that lists what you own and where it lives: which coins and tokens you hold, the wallets and what kind they are, the exchanges where you keep accounts, the hardware devices in play, and the password manager that ties it together. It is referenced by the plan rather than folded into it, so the will points to the inventory without reproducing any of its contents.
An inventory is only as good as its upkeep, and this is where most attempts quietly fail. Holdings change, wallets are added and abandoned, exchanges come and go, and a list written once and never revisited will be wrong by the time it matters. Treat the inventory as a living record you review on a fixed schedule and after any meaningful change — a new wallet, a closed account, a large transfer. A list accurate the day you sign it and stale a year later is worse than honest about the problem, because it sends your fiduciary confidently in the wrong direction.
How the inventory is stored is itself part of the design, and it has to balance two risks that pull against each other: the risk that no one can reach it when you die, and the risk that someone reaches it while you are alive. The next sections deal with the access mechanics in detail. For now the point is that the inventory should be specific enough to guide a fiduciary to every holding and protected well enough that it is not a sheet of paper anyone could photograph. Where holdings are large or custody is complex, it may belong inside a structure rather than in a drawer.
Grant explicit digital-asset authority to your fiduciaries
A fiduciary cannot act on assets the law has not authorized them to touch, and digital assets are the area where general language most often falls short. The two roles that matter are the executor, who administers your estate after death, and the agent you name under a power of attorney, who acts for you if you lose capacity during life — the heart of elder law digital asset management, since an incapacity before death can strand a holding as completely as death does. Both should be given explicit authority over digital assets, in terms that name digital assets and electronic communications directly rather than relying on a generic grant written before crypto existed.
The reason explicit language matters is that the access law is consent-driven. New York's version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — the framework that governs whether and how a fiduciary may reach your accounts and communications — looks first to what you authorized, and a clear grant in your will, trust, or power of attorney is the strongest way to direct it. Our article on fiduciary access to digital assets covers that statute in depth; the practical takeaway is that the authority should be stated on purpose, in each document where it belongs, so a custodian asked to release access sees a grant rather than silence.
Granting authority is not the same as handing over secrets, and the two should never be confused. Authority is the legal permission to act on your digital assets; the inventory and access instructions are the practical means to do so. A plan should give the executor and the agent clear authority, point them to the inventory, and arrange for the access details to reach them under controlled conditions — without writing those details into any document a court or custodian will read. Authority opens the door; the access instructions, handled separately, are what let a fiduciary walk through it.
Authority is the legal permission to act; the access instructions are the means — a plan grants the first openly and delivers the second under control.
When a trust earns its place in the plan
For some holders a will and a power of attorney are enough; for others a trust does work those documents cannot. The first reason to consider one is privacy and probate. A revocable living trust holds assets outside the probate estate, so holdings titled into it pass under the trust's private terms without the public court process a will requires — which keeps the existence and routing of your digital assets out of a filing anyone can read. For a holder whose main worry is that probate exposes too much, a revocable trust is the direct answer.
The second reason is management, and it grows with the size and complexity of the holding. A trust lets a named trustee hold and administer digital assets under written terms, across incapacity and death, without a gap in control — and where custody is involved, a directed or holding structure can separate the person who decides from the person who holds the keys. The firm's article on digital assets in trusts develops how those custody-and-succession structures work; for planning purposes, the point is that a trust can carry not just the coins but the arrangement for controlling them, which a will alone cannot do.
A trust, like every other part of the plan, does nothing until it is funded, and with crypto funding has its own demands. Funding means actually moving the assets into the trust's control — for digital assets that can mean transferring coins to wallets the trust controls and recording the arrangement in the inventory, not merely listing the trust as owner on paper. Self-custodied holdings raise particular questions about how keys are held and split inside the structure, which our article on self-custody and crypto inheritance addresses through multi-signature arrangements. Whether a trust belongs in your plan, and how it should hold and succeed to the keys, is a question for counsel.
Leave access instructions, name the right fiduciary, and review
The plan only works if the right person can reach the assets at the right moment, and that is the purpose of clear access instructions. They describe, in a form your fiduciary can act on, how to reach each holding — the hardware wallets and their backups, the exchange accounts and how they are secured, any multi-signature arrangement and who holds which key, and the password manager that ties the rest together. They are kept out of the public record and delivered under controlled conditions, so the right people get them at death or incapacity and no one gets them early. Many exchanges now offer beneficiary or legacy tools, and where they exist those should be set up and recorded in the inventory so they reinforce the plan rather than contradict it.
None of this matters if the fiduciary cannot actually handle digital assets, so the choice of person is part of the design. The executor or trustee who will administer crypto needs to work with wallets, exchanges, and keys, or to know to retain help that can — naming a relative who has never held a digital asset, with no support, is a common way for a careful plan to stall. Where holdings are significant, choose a fiduciary for capability as much as for trust, and give them a path they can realistically follow. Coordinate beneficiary designations and any exchange legacy tools with the will and trust as well, so that every channel points the same way.
A crypto estate plan is never finished, because the holdings it covers do not hold still. New wallets, closed accounts, a move to self-custody, a large gain, a change of exchange — any of these can leave a plan describing assets you no longer hold. Treat review as part of the plan: revisit the inventory, the access instructions, the authority grants, and the beneficiary settings on a regular schedule and after any meaningful change. Tax consequences shift as holdings and the law change, and those specifics belong with counsel and a tax adviser. The document you sign is the smallest part of the work; keeping the rest current, in New York and against the law as it stands, is what carries your digital assets to the people you chose.
The document you sign is the smallest part of the work — the inventory, the authority, and the access instructions, kept current, are what reach your heirs.