Digital Assets in a Deceased Estate: Crypto, Online Accounts and Access

The law is not the hard part. Access is

South Africa has no separate statute for digital assets, and it does not really need one for the ownership question. A thing of value that the deceased owned forms part of the estate, whether it is a bank account, a car or a wallet holding Bitcoin. It must be disclosed in the inventory and accounted for like anything else.

The problem is entirely practical. An executor with full legal authority and a court order still cannot recover crypto without the keys, and no institution exists that can be compelled to hand them over.

What counts as a digital asset

• Cryptocurrency, whether on a local or foreign exchange or in a self-custody wallet. SARS treats crypto assets as assets, so both capital gains on the deemed disposal at death and estate duty are in play.
• Money sitting in payment and fintech accounts, and in online trading or investment platforms.
• Domain names, which can be genuinely valuable and are transferable.
• An online business, a store, a monetised channel or an app with revenue attached to it.
• Intellectual property such as photographs, music, code and written work, together with any royalties.
• Loyalty programme balances and airline miles, though many programme terms say these are non-transferable and expire on death. Check the specific terms rather than assuming value.
• Personal accounts with no monetary value, such as social media and cloud photo storage, which matter to the family enormously and are dealt with by memorialisation or closure rather than inheritance.

Why the executor often cannot get in

• Most platform terms of service prohibit transferring an account and terminate the right of use on death. What can be inherited is the value, where it can be reached, not the account itself.
• Two-factor authentication tied to a phone number that gets cancelled the week after the funeral is a very common way for access to be lost permanently.
• Self-custody crypto is unrecoverable without the seed phrase or private key. There is no reset, no support line and no legal remedy. The asset simply ceases to be reachable.
• Custodial exchanges do generally have a deceased estate process and will engage with an executor who produces Letters of Executorship and a death certificate. Foreign exchanges add their own compliance requirements and can be slow.
• Attempting to access accounts by using the deceased's credentials, even with good intentions, sits in an uncomfortable legal position and can breach the platform's terms and potentially the Cybercrimes Act. Go through the platform's estate process instead.

What an executor should do

1. Ask the family directly and early what exists. Digital assets rarely appear in bank statements.
2. Look at the deceased's email for exchange, platform and domain registrar correspondence. Email is usually the index to everything else.
3. Check bank and card statements for recurring payments to platforms, and for transfers to and from exchanges.
4. Preserve the deceased's phone and its SIM. Do not let the number be cancelled before you have finished, because it is frequently the second authentication factor for everything.
5. Contact each custodial platform through its formal deceased estate channel, with Letters of Executorship and a certified death certificate.
6. Value the assets as at the date of death and disclose them in the inventory and in the liquidation and distribution account, including crypto, and deal with the capital gains and estate duty consequences.
7. Where an asset is genuinely unrecoverable, record it and the reason in the file. Do not simply leave it off the account.

How to plan for it, if you are reading this in advance

The single most useful thing anyone can do is leave a written register of what exists and where it is held, kept separately from the will and updated occasionally.

• Never put passwords, seed phrases or private keys in a will. A will lodged with the Master becomes accessible to interested parties, and a will is not a secure document.
• Keep the register with the will as a separate sealed document, or in a password manager whose emergency access feature is set up in advance, or with the attorney holding the will.
• List what exists and where, not the credentials themselves: which exchanges, which wallets, which registrars, which platforms.
• Use the platforms' own tools. Several large providers have a legacy contact or inactive account feature which is far more effective than anything an executor can do afterwards.
• For meaningful crypto holdings, take specific advice on custody and succession. A multi-signature arrangement or a properly documented custodial holding is dramatically easier to inherit than a seed phrase in a drawer.

Frequently asked questions

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