Digital assets in your will: photos, accounts, crypto, devices

When the Wills Act was passed in 1837, the things people owned were almost all visible and tangible — land, livestock, furniture, jewellery, money in metal coin. The Act has aged remarkably well, but the world has not stayed still. A great deal of what most people now value sits inside an account on a server somewhere — photographs, music, manuscripts, business records, cryptocurrency, even the means of accessing the rest of their estate. A modern will has to cope with that or it leaves a mess.

What counts as a 'digital asset'

The phrase has no statutory definition. We use it to cover four broad categories: (1) digital files you own — photos, videos, documents, music collections; (2) cryptocurrency and other digital tokens you hold the keys to; (3) online accounts that hold value or meaning — email, cloud storage, social media, subscriptions; and (4) revenue-generating digital property — domains, websites, online stores, monetised channels. Each category behaves differently in law.

What can be inherited and what can't

Files you own outright (photos on a hard drive, documents on your own server) pass with the rest of your estate, like any other personal possession. Cryptocurrency held in a wallet you control passes the same way — provided your executor can find the wallet and the keys. Online accounts are different. The terms of service for most major platforms (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta) say explicitly that the account itself is non-transferable; what your executor can do is request access to the contents under each platform's bereavement process. The licences you bought — to films on iTunes, books on Kindle, songs on a streaming service — generally end with you. We know this surprises people. It is genuinely the law as the platforms have written it.

Crypto: a special warning

Cryptocurrency is the digital asset class we see fail most often at probate. The asset exists, the executors know it exists, but no one can find the seed phrase or the device that holds the wallet. There is no help line. There is no recovery process. If the keys are lost, the asset is lost — not 'unclaimed', not 'in escrow', simply unrecoverable forever. Anyone holding crypto should be writing the access path for their executors with the same seriousness they would write the will itself, and storing it somewhere their executors will be able to find without storing it anywhere a thief can.

How to handle digital assets in your will

Three things, in order: First, list the assets — not the passwords, the assets. 'My iCloud photo library', 'the wallet on my Ledger device', 'the family photo archive on the Synology in the loft'. Second, appoint a digital executor or give your existing executors explicit authority to deal with digital assets (the Velati template does this by default). Third, store the access information separately. Most people use a reputable password manager with a designated emergency contact; some use a sealed envelope with a solicitor or in a fireproof safe. The will itself must never contain passwords or seed phrases — wills are public documents once probate is granted.

What Velati's questionnaire asks

We screen for digital assets early in the questionnaire. If you confirm you hold any, we prompt for a category-by-category inventory (without ever capturing access credentials), generate the appropriate authority clauses for your executor, and include a printable Digital Estate Companion document with the signing pack. The companion is yours to fill in and store separately from the will, with the access information.

What we cannot do

We cannot override the terms of service that govern your accounts — if a platform's terms say your iTunes library does not pass to your beneficiaries, no will can change that. We cannot recover lost crypto keys. We cannot guarantee that a platform will release the contents of your account to your executor (most do; some require a court order). What we can do is make sure the will gives your executor the strongest position the law allows them to take.