Crypto inheritance, a named beneficiary for your account

A client names one beneficiary. If the client dies or is found legally incapacitated, that named person is the one EarnPark deals with over the assets and balances sitting in the account. Nothing about the account changes while the client is alive and well, and the nomination can be revisited.

This matters more in crypto than elsewhere. A bank account leaves a paper trail that an executor can follow. A crypto position often leaves nothing a family can act on, because nobody outside the account holder knows where the funds were or how to reach them. A designation on file closes that gap for the balances held with EarnPark. It does not touch assets held anywhere else, in self custody or on any other platform.

Estate planning for cryptocurrency has two halves, and most plans only cover one of them. The legal half is the same as for any other asset. A will or a trust decides who is entitled to what, and succession law in the holder's own country decides how that is enforced. The technical half is where crypto breaks the pattern. Entitlement means nothing without access, and access to crypto is a private key, a seed phrase, or a login and a second factor.

Self custody puts that whole problem on the holder. If the keys are gone, the coins stay on chain forever and nobody, including the network itself, can move them or reissue them. Bitcoin inheritance failures are almost always key failures rather than legal ones. Assets held with a custodian or a platform behave differently, because there is an entity that records who the account belongs to and a process an heir can go through. That is the part a beneficiary designation is meant to make routine instead of adversarial.

In practice there are three outcomes, and which one a family gets is decided long before anyone needs it. The first is a planned inheritance, where a beneficiary is already named and already identified to whoever holds the assets, so the transfer is an administrative step. The second is a custodian recovery, where nothing was arranged in advance and the family has to approach the platform with a death certificate, probate documents and proof of relationship. That route usually works, but it is slow, and it only works if the family knows the account exists in the first place.

The third outcome is the one worth planning against. Coins in self custody with keys that nobody else can reconstruct are simply lost, and no amount of paperwork changes that. Nothing here is unique to Bitcoin or Ethereum. It applies to any asset where control is a secret rather than a name on a record.

The process is handled by a personal manager, not by a form in the app, and it is currently available to larger clients on the VIP side of the platform. At a high level, the manager collects identity documents and signed paperwork from both the client and the nominated beneficiary, and the designation is then held on record. We deliberately do not publish the document list here, because the underlying procedure is internal and still changing. The exact requirements are confirmed with the manager, case by case.

Nothing is automatic at execution. When a designation is acted on, the beneficiary goes through the same identity and AML checks that any client goes through before assets move. That is the point of the paperwork collected up front. It means the person receiving the assets is already known to the platform rather than appearing as a stranger at the worst possible moment.

To start, speak to your personal manager or write to support and ask whether your account qualifies today.

This is the single most common mistake in crypto estate planning, and it is worth stating plainly. A will can become a public document once it goes through probate, and it can be read by court staff, executors and anyone entitled to a copy long before an heir ever sees it. Writing a seed phrase or a private key into it hands the assets to whoever reads it first. The same goes for a password, an exchange login, or a recovery code sitting in a shared drive or an email folder.

A designation avoids the problem by carrying a name rather than a secret. EarnPark never asks a client for a seed phrase or a private key, and a beneficiary is recorded as a person to be identified later, not as a credential to be stored. Assets in the account sit in Fireblocks custody, so there is no key for a family to find and no key for a family to lose.

There is no public policy document behind this yet, so what you can confirm today is the process itself, by asking for it and going through it with a manager rather than reading a published policy. We list it here anyway because few platforms in this space offer a designation at all, and because a signal worth having is worth stating before it is polished.

It is also not a will and not legal advice. Succession law in the client's own jurisdiction still applies, and a designation with EarnPark is best set up alongside whatever estate planning the client already has rather than instead of it. If access to the account itself is the concern, the same conversation is a good moment to review withdrawal whitelisting on the account.

Tax is outside this page as well. Whether an inherited crypto position is taxed, and at what value, depends entirely on where the deceased and the heir are resident, and EarnPark does not give legal, tax or estate planning advice. Set a designation up alongside a qualified estate lawyer and a tax adviser, not instead of them.