Tancred Lidbury’s Post

The largest wealth transfer in human history is currently being passed down by a generation that wrote things on paper, to a generation that wrote things on the internet, via a generation that prefers not to discuss money at all. What could possibly go wrong? In practice, this means a solicitor reading out a will to a roomful of grieving relatives that says “to my issue, in equal shares.” On paper, the children inherit £50mm of Bitcoin. In reality, they inherit a sentence on a page and the sound of their accountant slowly realising he has been bested by a man who probably wrote down his seed phrase on the back of a Pret receipt in 2017 and put it somewhere safe, the location of which has died with him. The exchange wants identity verification from someone who is no longer in a position to verify anything, including the time of day. The accountant’s spreadsheet, which has columns for property and shares and the racehorse leg, does not have a column for “twelve random words, possibly Norwegian.” Multiply this by the roughly $3tn of digital assets currently sitting on hardware wallets, in obscure SPVs, on domain registers, on social platforms, and in loyalty programmes that have somehow accumulated six/ seven figure balances, and you have the makings of an industry-wide problem that nobody in this sector seems overly competent in resolving. Good news, solutions have started to appear. Vault12 handles encrypted inheritance for crypto wallets. Casa builds heir recovery into self-custody. Coincover offers institutional-grade succession planning. Owner.One is building digital asset succession as a complete platform. Ledger has added recovery to its hardware wallets. The technology is not the issue, and has not been for some time. The issue is that the families who most need this have never heard of any of these companies, their solicitors haven’t either, and their accountants are still printing things out and putting them in ring binders, in some cases the same ring binders they have been using since the Major government. A perfectly serviceable Vault12 account is no use to an individual who has never heard of Vault12. Which is what most of private wealth has always been about. Not solving every problem yourself, but knowing the person who already has, and being in a position to make the introduction at the right moment. Preferably before (rather than after!) the moment becomes the one nobody planned for. The sort of moment that ends with a tearful junior associate in a meeting room in Lincoln’s Inn, googling “what is a seed phrase” on the firm’s IT-restricted browser at four in the afternoon.