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What happens to bitcoins when their owner dies?

2026-05-15 09:39:34Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

What happens to bitcoins when their owner dies?

Eighty-four trillion dollars. That's the amount that will change hands over the next two decades, in the largest transfer of wealth humanity has ever known. Real estate, stocks, companies, all will travel from the dead to the living, through wills and notarial deeds. But a greater part of this wealth than ever before is stored on a hard drive, on a piece of hardware, in a drawer, behind a code that the owner took with him. Cryptography has created a new category: death without an inheritance.

The Invisible Burn
According to analysis by Chainalysis and River Financial, between 2.3 million and 3.7 million Bitcoins have disappeared from circulation forever—a figure that amounts to 18% of the total supply. Every day, another 566 Bitcoins pass into the “ancient supply” category: coins that have not been moved for more than ten years, a rate that exceeds the daily production of new coins by miners. The Bitcoin code forgets nothing. It simply refuses to give up.

Outside of cryptocurrencies, the picture is no less bleak. Virtual real estate in the Metaverse, parcels of land purchased for six-figure sums during 2021, has fallen by 95% on The Sandbox and 89% on Decentraland. However, they remain locked away in inactive wallets. They cannot be sold, leased, or used. They are digital corpses, and no one has the key to destroy them.

Digital Mausoleums: The Lesson of QuadrigaCX
In December 2018, Gerald Cotten died suddenly in India at the age of 30. He was the founder of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, and the only person who knew the passwords to the company’s cold wallets. One hundred and fifteen thousand customers were left out, with $190 million locked behind encryption that no expert has been able to decipher. His widow found no written evidence. Ernst & Young found that the wallets were not locked. They were empty.

Cotten’s case is extreme, but not unique. Matthew Mellon, heir to a banking dynasty, had invested $2 million in Ripple and turned it into a billion. Fearing for his safety, he distributed Ledger devices with private keys across the United States, without telling anyone where or how. When he died suddenly in 2018, the fortune was recovered, but so late that the market crash and legal restrictions on liquidation “ate up” two-thirds of its value. Access was only the first step. The second was not planned.

The new archaeologists of the digital world
From this loss, a new profession with a thriller atmosphere has been born: the digital asset manager. It combines cryptography, cybersecurity and inheritance law, and its demand grows in proportion to the number of “orphaned” properties on the blockchain. At the most dramatic end of this market are ethical hackers. Joe Grand, known as “Kingpin”, managed in 2022 to bypass the protection of a cryptocurrency storage device, the Trezor One, through “fault injection” techniques, recovering $ 2 million. Two years later, in one of the most cinematic stories in the industry, he “hacked time”: he exploited a vulnerability in the random number generator of the RoboForm software, digitally returned to 2013 to predict the code that was created at that time and recovered $ 3 million from oblivion. But even Grand admits that his technique has its limits. If the device is physically damaged, there is no going back.

Above this layer of “digital archaeologists” sits the institutional custodian. Switzerland’s Sygnum Bank, the world’s first digital asset bank, and Anchorage Digital in the US, the first federally licensed cryptocurrency bank, now offer legacy procedures that look remarkably like those of a regular bank. For the system skeptics who turned to cryptocurrencies precisely because they didn’t want a bank, there’s a bitter irony.


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