DeFi crypto wallet aims to decentralize inheritance of crypto and NFTs

Published at: June 1, 2022

The concept of cryptocurrency inheritance continues to rapidly evolve as the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry spawns more ways to make a “crypto will.”

The Israeli crypto software provider Kirobo is moving to tackle a major void in the DeFi industry by providing crypto investors with an opportunity to pass private keys or transfer funds according to their last will.

The firm announced on Tuesday the launch of an inheritance feature on its decentralized crypto wallet Liquid Vault, allowing users to designate crypto wallets to inherit their funds.

The new solution enables the generation and execution of an automated last will and testament without the need for lawyers, government authorities or any other centralized entity. Instead, users just need to select up to eight beneficiaries and choose a date for distributing the assets to the designated wallets.

Liquid Vault’s new inheritance mechanism is based on Kirobo’s unique “future conditional transactions” technology, similar to the wallet’s backup feature. The tool allows users to create future transactions or get a secondary access point to crypto based on various conditions.

“Future conditional transactions is a unique infrastructure, based on smart contracts. It allows users to sign future transactions and to condition them on almost anything,” Kirobo CEO Asaf Naim told Cointelegraph. “It also allows third parties to develop complex services on the blockchain without the need to develop smart contracts,” the CEO added.

Launched in beta in late 2021, the Liquid Vault wallet supports Ether (ETH) and all ERC-20 tokens, including the Ethereum-based version of Bitcoin (BTC), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), as well as ERC-721 nonfungible tokens (NFTs). At launch, Liquid Vault’s inheritance tool supports ETH and ERC-20 tokens, with Kirobo also planning to add support for theinheritance of NFTs with future updates.

“There’s a growing trend of Web3 users holding significant sums in cryptocurrency, increasingly relying on these assets in investment portfolios and retirement nest-eggs,” Naim noted. According to the CEO, the new tool unlocks a simple and secure inheritance mechanism to pass digital wealth to future generations while “staying true to Web3’s values of decentralization and community ownership.”

The issue of crypto inheritance is one of the most concerning questions for crypto owners as private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) don’t allow anyone but the owners to control their assets by design. As of 2020, as much as 4 million BTC, or about 20% of the total circulating BTC, was estimated to be lost forever due to lost access to BTC, with a large portion likely caused by death.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, there are a wide number of ways to pass on crypto to the next generation, including using software inheritance services or simply sharing keys with trusted family members.