As the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry generates new ways to form a "crypto legacy," the concept of bitcoin inheritance continues to grow swiftly.
Kirobo, an Israeli crypto software company, is attempting to fill a huge gap in the DeFi market by allowing crypto investors to hand over private keys or transfer funds according to their last will and testament.
On May 31, the company announced the launch of an inheritance function for Liquid Vault, a decentralized crypto wallet, which allows users to nominate crypto wallets to inherit their funds.
The innovative system eliminates the need for lawyers, government agencies, or any other centralized organization to create and execute an automated last will and testament. Instead, users must choose up to eight beneficiaries and a date for the funds to be distributed to the chosen wallets.
Similar to the wallet's backup feature, Liquid Vault's new inheritance method is built on Kirobo's unique "future provisional transactions" technology. Based on certain parameters, the tool allows users to create future transactions or obtain a secondary access point to crypto.
“Future conditional transactions is a one-of-a-kind smart contract framework. It enables users to sign transactions in the future and condition them on nearly anything,” Kirobo CEO Asaf Naim told sources. “It also enables third-party developers to create complex services on the blockchain without having to write smart contracts,” the CEO added.
The Liquid Vault wallet supports Ether and all ERC-20 tokens, including the Ethereum-based version of Bitcoin, Wrapped Bitcoin, as well as ERC-721 nonfungible tokens, and was released in beta in late 2021. The inheritance function in Liquid Vault now supports ETH and ERC-20 tokens, with Kirobo planning to add support for NFTs in future versions. "There's a rising trend among Web3 users to hold considerable amounts of cryptocurrencies, increasingly counting on these assets in investment strategies and retirement nest eggs,” Naim observed. The new tool, according to the CEO, provides a simple and safe succession method for passing digital assets to future generations while "keeping true to Web3's goals of decentralization and community ownership.”
Crypto inheritance is one of the most troubling issues for crypto owners, as private cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are designed to prevent anyone other than the owners from controlling their assets. As of 2020, it was anticipated that up to 4 million BTC, or roughly 20% of total circulating BTC, will be lost forever owing to lost access to BTC, with a substantial percentage presumably due to death.
