What problems do smart wills solve?

The transfer of property after passing has a very long history, but this process has remained static for centuries. And whether in the form of real estate, money or ordinary objects, it involves several issues.

When people talk about wills they spontaneously think of distribution of physical possessions with monetary value. Yet nowadays, most of our important life experiences and memories are captured and stored in emails, digital images, videos, and other digital files. These are also part of our legacy and traditional testaments are ill equipped to handle them.

As digital items become more valuable, and not just in terms of emotional but monetary value as well, they demand a new level of consideration. Let’s take cryptocurrencies for example. At the moment we store them in wallets that can be accessed through a digital private key or password-protected encrypted files. If an individual holding cryptocurrencies dies without having communicated his/her wallet credentials to third persons, then the entire wallet balances are irrevocably lost.

But conventional wills are not meant for this. While some solutions addressing this problem exist, they rely on a model that entrusts everything in the hands of one organisation. How likely is that a company will still be there in 50+ years or that it will still operate under the same rules?

Wills are also written as ordinary documents, and can get lost or destroyed. Since they must be easily accessible by the executors when the moment arrives, wills are usually not stored securely. This compromises the content’s integrity and confidentiality. Additionally, having to trust a third person to properly execute the process makes them inherently unreliable. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of wills are contested each year.

Here’s where the blockchain really shines.

When looking at the problems in current wills, one would be forgiven for thinking that blockchains and smart contracts were specifically created to solve them. We saw how we need a digital, secure, and long lasting solution… and those are precisely the properties we found in Ethereum (and, we expect, many blockchains to come), and that we leverage in Legacy.

Legacy empowers anyone to decide the fate of his memories and belongings, with four main goals:

• Simplifying the process of transferring digital assets in the event of the owner’s death

Legacy is specially designed to be an easy-to-use application. Being oriented towards a wide public, with a focus on young parents but also including seniors and baby boomers, its usability and accessibility are one of its most important aspects. Users should be able to create and configure an account in a few steps, without the need for setting up external services (like, for instance, a third-party storage service).

• A service that ensures security, reliability, privacy and long-term operation

Legacy’s core logic will reside in the Ethereum blockchain, which guarantees its integrity and availability in the future. A large blockchain network such as Ethereum guarantees long-term operation because it does not rely on a single organization. Shutting it down would require ridiculous amounts of effort. A blockchain also allows the secure transfer of digital assets without the need for intermediaries. Users’ data will be stored across a distributed network, ensuring privacy and reliability. A design approach oriented towards decentralization and self-sustainability is also essential to further meet these properties.

• Reducing the need for trusted third parties for creating and executing a will

The need for trusted third parties for transferring property usually has more to do with legal issues than with technical aspects. From a technical standpoint, advanced algorithms combined with smart contracts allow the simplification of the process.

• An enhanced, smart will allowing to transfer cryptocurrency and smart property

Our ultimate goal is to integrate a wide variety of transferable items, including cryptocurrencies and other virtual assets, as well as smart property (that is, property that can be traded and transferred through the blockchain).

To find out more about Legacy:

Join our Telegram: https://t.me/legacynetwork
Check out our website: https://legacy.network
or follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/alegacynetwork