Managing Cryptoassets with Pamela Morgan
Managing and securely storing your cryptoassets — spread across ledgers, wallets, exchanges and various third party services — can be a daunting task. How to pass them on in case of one’s death is even more of an uncharted territory in the nascent cryptocurrency space, and it’s rarely on people’s mind. Lawyer Pamela Morgan has been helping people and organizations build solutions to safely store their cryptoassets and has recently turned her attention to inheritance planning. In this Epicenter episode she presented a simple plan on how to tackle this issue.
Pamela Morgan is an attorney, educator and entrepreneur, passionate about the game changing potential of cryptocurrencies in empowering individuals in their pursuit of financial freedom and independence. Together with Andreas M. Antonopoulos she runs Third Key Solutions, a company that offers consulting and cryptographic key management solutions for companies using digital currencies, helping them to navigate the legal aspects of cryptoasset ownership, and take informed decisions to keep their assets safe and secure.
According to Chainanalysis study about 80% of all Bitcoin transactions are carried out by trusted third parties — exchanges, hosted wallets etc., and users have become comfortable letting those services handle their assets. Nevertheless, Pamela believes that educating individuals as to how to manage their own cryptoassets without relying on any intermediaries is crucial to achieving the promise behind crypto, financial freedom and independence. Even though learning key management can seem tough and onerous, and in addition, we’ve been taught that trusted financial institutions are better at storing our money — according to Pamela, holding on to that mindset is not helpful in ushering the big wave of societal change offered by cryptocurrencies.
Pamela is on a mission to educate people on how to successfully plan the cryptoassets inheritance planning processes. First of all, she recommends preparing a simple inventory and writing a letter to inform the family, loved ones or chosen heirs, listing the cryptocurrency assets being stored and how to access them — without revealing the private keys, mnemonic seeds or any other sensitive information in that letter! She also suggests nominating someone trustworthy and crypto-savvy who can help the rightful heirs access the locked assets.
To find out more, read Pamela’s book on Cryptoassets Inheritance Planning or check out her useful blog posts on this topic. Pamela also organizes workshops for lawyers wanting to learn about the Bitcoin, blockchain and smart contract essentials in order to help them better serve their clients.
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