Understanding Cryptoasset Inheritance via Safient Survey
Unlike your conventional estate planning, the crypto-asset inheritance mechanism is complicated due to the self custody of assets. While the crypto market crossed the 2 trillion mark a while ago, only a handful of crypto asset holders have carved out an inheritance plan for their loved ones. Safient conducted a survey a few months back to analyze the penetration of inheritance mechanisms among crypto holders. Here’s a preliminary analysis of the study conducted by Safient:
Wallet and seed phrases backup
Once you start to hold crypto assets, it becomes extremely important to secure your valuable yet legally unregulated crypto funds. Most crypto holders lack the motivation to create a backup for their wallet/device as we tend to ignore the imaginations that involve the worst outcome. But what happens if a user forgets their password or loses the two-step verification device. The assets will be unrecoverable. In the Safient survey, only 48% have admitted to curate a backup plan for themselves in case they lose access to their current wallet/device. The majority still think the backup is a painful task. There are enough stories in the market about people who purchased crypto and would have been billionaires today if they hadn’t lost their passwords or threw their hard drive away. Without a backup, your wallet is prone to security breaches and identity thefts with no insurance cover. Quadriga’s high-profile case cost them a $250M loss alone. A backup will protect you against many human and technological errors.
Sharing crypto asset portfolio with loved ones
Once you have created a backed-up and secured crypto asset portfolio, it’s time to share it with your close ones. It’s handy in case of emergencies or when you cannot access your portfolio for a reason or two. If something unfortunate happens to you tomorrow and your heirs have no clue about your account information, the coins will be forever lost in the system as no one even makes an effort to search for crypto assets. As per a Safient survey, only one in five users have shared their portfolio details with someone in their life. The other 80% is unaccounted for and at potential risk. Moreover, accessing the cryptocurrency wallet of a deceased without any legal inheritance plan may attract legal attention. So, if you haven’t shared your crypto asset portfolio with your loved ones yet, do it today because, in case of tragedies, even the recoverable coins might go unnoticed forever.
Inheriting crypto assets after death
In conventional estate planning, there are already tens of billions of assets sitting unclaimed in banks as of now. Among the 20% of holders who shared their crypto portfolio with loved ones, only 22% have crafted an inheritance plan in case something tragic might happen. It makes sense that a younger demographic is less likely to think about death and passing on assets.
Choosing the right inheritance and storage platform for your crypto assets
It is indeed difficult and skeptical to trust a third party with your digital assets. In our survey, 22% of users admitted a good reputation on social media as proof to trust an application to store your secret information. Expectedly, 50% of users will trust such applications only after an authenticated security audit-proof. The rest want some famous personalities to back the platform. There are millions of examples worldwide where impersonification and security breaches led to currency theft. That’s where Safient comes into the picture. The platform uses decentralized storage, smart contracts, and cryptography techniques to build a protocol that helps to store, recover, inherit crypto assets and other confidential information. You can secure all your crypto portfolios on the platforms hassle-free.
Every enterprise requires funds to function. And when it comes to securing your digital assets estimating millions, it is worth paying a one-time fee as token money for protection. 4 out of 5 users have admitted to paying a refundable one-time fee ranging from $50 to $100.
We at Safient understand the needs of our consumers and envision creating a digitized and secure cryptocurrency inheritance plan using decentralized storage, smart contracts, and cryptography techniques. Safient's safe also stores critical information in encrypted form to access and recover the assets in a trustless manner and thus bridging the gap between the holders and the heirs in a safe way. We have made great progress so far to prove the prototype and we are close to delivering the first usable version to the public. Until then, you can follow our progress through Twitter and Discord. Check out https://safient.io for more details.
A few more resources to learn more about Safient:
Documentation: https://docs.safient.io
Resources and roadmap: https://resources.safient.io
GitHub: https://github.com/safient
Twitter: https://twitter.com/safientio
