Digital Inheritance
SecretShield can help ensure your loved ones can gain access to digital assets such as your crypto upon your passing.
You should consult a lawyer for crypto estate planning. SecretShield is a digital tool for securely recovering your data, not a replacement for legal documents and a trustworthy executor.
What does it mean to protect a digital inheritance for your loved ones?
Protecting a digital inheritance ensures your loved ones can access your crypto assets after you're gone. This involves two key steps:
- Legal Planning: Work with an attorney specializing in crypto estate planning to ensure proper legal documentation for inheritance.
- Secure Access: Go beyond legal documents and take steps to guarantee your loved ones can access your assets. This might involve using secure storage solutions and clear instructions on how to inherit your crypto.
What are the risks of not having SecretShield as part of a digital inheritance plan?
Providing your estate planner or executor directly with a copy of your crypto wallet recovery phrase or private keys is a major risk. Specifically, there are real stories where such trusted people have broken that trust and stolen from the inheritance.
Even when such people can be fully trusted, there is a bigger risk that the information may be stolen from a physical filing cabinet or a computer. For example, modern computer viruses will scan files and documents for content in the form of a recovery phrase or private key and then use them to automatically steal any crypto associated with them.
Since transactions in crypto are final, there is no way to undo them or reverse such a transaction.
How is SecretShield safe?
SecretShield uses advanced encryption and Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) to ensure that sensitive information is split and stored securely. The split data does not contain any part of the secret. The secret is only reconstructed locally on your device, never on the cloud, ensuring maximum security.
To learn more about the techniques we’ve employed, visit our Security and Data Privacy page.
Do I need to consult a lawyer?
Yes, we strongly recommend consulting a lawyer when establishing, modifying or dealing with estates, trusts, and wills. SecretShield enhances the security and management of digital assets but can not replace strong crypto estate planning, or generate any legal documents.
Is a Will still required?
Yes, a Will is essential for legally determining the distribution of an estate upon passing. SecretShield's Trustee features complement a “Crypto Will” by securely managing digital assets, but they do not replace the legal necessity of a written document.
Can SecretShield be used for a Living Trust?
SecretShield can be used to support a Living Trust, but does not replace the legal documents required to establish one. SecretShield can securely store and manage the digital aspects of a living trust via Secrets and Trustees, making the transition of assets seamless and avoiding the complications of probate.
I have a paid subscription, can I designate a beneficiary or executor?
Yes, paid subscribers that have Trustees available can assign them to Will beneficiaries or executors. In the context of our app, you can create a Beneficiary by assigning them or your Executor as a Trustee. Trustees can recover your secrets with the assistance of your Guardians based on thresholds you set.
If you want your Beneficiary or Executor to have access to all of your Secrets, they must be assigned as a Trustee to each individually. Be sure to checkout the Digital Inheritance Best Practices listed towards the bottom of this page.
Can I have multiple Beneficiaries?
Yes. There are a few ways you can configure multiple Beneficiaries in the app. We highly recommend consulting legal counsel to ensure the system is configured in line with your Crypto Will.
If you need to split the assets, we suggest assigning the executor as the Trustee, so they can ensure the proper allocation of assets. This is not legal advice. Every situation is unique.
- You can assign each Beneficiary as a Trustee. You can require the executor’s participation as a Guardian required for recovery.
- You can assign the Executor as the Trustee and each of your Beneficiaries as Guardians required for recovery.
If you need to split assets stored by a single Secret Key, an Executor is a popular choice as a Trustee. Consult legal counsel.
Can the beneficiary be the executor or a trustee?
Yes, the Beneficiary can be designated as a Trustee. The executor will be defined in legal documents outside of SecretShield, but can also be a Trustee if desired.
Is SecretShield notified when the Secret Owner passes?
No, SecretShield is not automatically notified when the Secret Owner passes. The process of initiating the recovery of assets relies on the steps taken by the Will’s Executor and Beneficiaries as Guardians and Trustees.
Do Beneficiaries or Executors have to be paid SecretShield subscribers?
No, beneficiaries or executors do not need to be paid SecretShield subscribers in order to act as Trustees or Guardians. They do need to download the app and register in order to properly configure recovery.
How much time does it take to set up a beneficiary?
Setting up a Beneficiary as a Trustee is a straightforward process that can be completed in a few minutes through the app’s settings.
Digital Inheritance Best Practices
Create New, Dedicated Secrets
This will help you stay organized within the app.
You can store the same secret more than once by cloning it or entering it twice, we suggest that you dedicate a secret for this purpose rather than using the same entry for your own recovery.
Don’t tell your Guardians Everything
Guardians do not need to know about each other (and we suggest not informing them of the other guardians or the threshold). A trustee should be and will have access to see the other guardians, the name of the secret, and the threshold.
Guardians should be informed that they are holding shares for inheritance and they should be informed of the assigned trustee along with the instruction to not approve a request from that trustee for recovering your secret (the app will display such a message), until your passing.
Distribute Recovery Shares Strategically
Shares do not need to be distributed evenly amongst Guardians. Consider giving an executor (assigned as a Guardian) additional shares so that a recovery cannot be achieved without the executor’s involvement.
Check-in Occasionally
Check and ensure via the SecretShield app that the guardians still hold their shares. If not, clone and redistribute the secret to ensure it is recoverable.
Keep a Physical Backup SecretShield cannot predict the future: war, an EMP or something else could cause a secret to be unrecoverable. Consider having an additional backup or means if this worst-case scenario were to come to fruition.