Two Kinds of Digital Asset

The plan must treat two categories differently.

Custodial, account-based assets

Exchange and hosted-wallet accounts, brokerage and bank logins, email, cloud storage, domain names, loyalty balances, a business’s online presence. A provider holds the asset. It is recoverable in principle — the provider has it — and the problem is purely legal: establishing your fiduciary’s authority to compel access.

Self-custodied, bearer assets

Cryptocurrency in a hardware wallet, NFTs, the private keys and seed phrases themselves. Here the key is the asset. There is no provider, no customer service line, no password reset. Lose the key and no court, executor, or trust can recover the value. An estimated one bitcoin in five is already lost this way — not stolen, simply locked behind forgotten keys.