When a Boulder software engineer passed away, his family knew the crypto existed — he had mentioned it at Thanksgiving. What they never found was the way in. No seed phrase, no exchange login, no instructions. The value remains permanently out of reach.
Most estates now include digital property: cryptocurrency, online banking access, cloud photo libraries, domain names, online businesses, and email accounts that unlock everything else. Traditional wills were not written with it in mind.
Whiteford's Colorado team builds digital assets into estate plans. This page covers what counts as a digital asset, why fiduciaries get locked out, and the practical system that keeps your online life reachable.
What counts as a digital asset — more than crypto
Cryptocurrency gets the headlines because it is unforgiving: whoever holds the keys holds the asset, and lost keys mean lost value. But the bigger everyday category is access itself — the email account that receives every password reset, the cloud storage holding decades of family photos, payment apps with balances, the domains and storefronts that may be a family's livelihood.
Some digital assets have market value; others only sentimental value; a few, like a revenue-producing website, are genuine businesses. A plan should sort yours into those buckets, because each is handled differently — valued and transferred, preserved and shared, or managed and sold.
- Cryptocurrency and exchange accounts, where key custody is everything
- Email and cloud storage — the master keys to the rest of the estate
- Online financial accounts, payment apps, and stored balances
- Domains, websites, storefronts, and creator accounts that earn income
- Photo libraries, social media, and subscriptions that need closing or memorializing
Why families get locked out — and what the law can fix
Two walls stand between a grieving family and a loved one's accounts: terms-of-service agreements that prohibit password sharing and account transfer, and privacy laws that bar providers from handing over contents freely. Well-meaning workarounds — logging in as the deceased — can violate those terms and computer-access laws. The lockout is a legal problem, not just a technical one.
Colorado has adopted a uniform law on fiduciary access to digital assets, which lets you authorize your personal representative, trustee, or agent to reach digital property — but it works best when explicit in your documents and paired with providers' own legacy-contact tools. Silence in your will means the law defaults to the providers' terms, and families inherit the lockout.
A practical system: inventory, access, authority
The plan has three layers. Inventory: a maintained list of accounts and assets — without passwords written in the will, which becomes public in probate. Access: credentials kept in a password manager or secure instruction letter your fiduciary can reach, with crypto keys stored under a custody arrangement matched to the amount at stake. Authority: estate documents that expressly empower your fiduciaries to access, manage, and close digital accounts.
The free Colorado Estate Snapshot at /estate-snapshot includes digital assets in its inventory prompts, and a free Legacy Game Plan Session is the natural place to bring the messy reality of your online life. The attorney will tailor the custody details — especially for crypto — to what you actually hold.
