When my husband Tom died, I had everything an estate planning attorney is supposed to have.
I had a revocable living trust that he and I had funded over years, carefully titled to avoid probate. I had his will, signed in front of two witnesses and a notary, with the pour-over provisions drafted by a colleague I trust. I had his medical power of attorney and his financial power of attorney, and a HIPAA authorization in case the hospital ever asked. I had Tom's thoughtful instructions to our children. I had the life insurance policy with me named as primary beneficiary. I had everything I tell my clients to have.
What I did not have was a way to access the crypto my husband had quietly built over the years.
The Phone Call I Could Not Make
Here is what you learn, the first week after your spouse dies, if they held meaningful crypto and you did not plan for it: there is no phone number to call.
When someone dies with a Fidelity account, you call Fidelity. You provide a death certificate. You provide a Letters Testamentary or a copy of the trust. Within days or weeks, the named beneficiary has the money or the account is retitled to the trust. It is an administrative process, performed tens of thousands of times a year, by people whose entire job is to move assets from the deceased to the living.
When someone dies with self-custodied crypto on a hardware wallet, you do not call anyone. The assets are not at an institution. They are on a blockchain, controlled by a private key, which either you have or you do not. If you do not, the customer service line for Bitcoin is a URL that returns a 404 error.
Tom was not careless. He was careful, in the way crypto people are careful — he used a hardware wallet, he never shared his seed phrase, he did not store it in the cloud. His carefulness was, for me, exactly the problem.
What Texas Law Does and Does Not Do
The Texas Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — Chapter 2001 of the Texas Estates Code — does give a personal representative some default authority over a decedent's digital assets. It helps. It is not a solution.
What the statute can do: give your executor legal authority to contact an exchange, present a death certificate, and request access to a custodial account. That is a meaningful tool for Coinbase balances, Kraken holdings, or anything else held at an institution.
What the statute cannot do: produce the seed phrase to a hardware wallet that no one in the family has ever seen. Legal authority does not reconstruct a 24-word mnemonic that exists only on a piece of paper in a drawer no one has opened.
For the custodial portion of Tom's holdings, we eventually worked it out. It took months. For the self-custody portion, I got lucky — I found the seed phrase, eventually, in a place I will not describe here because I am not going to help burglars — and Tom would have laughed at where it was. Most families do not get lucky. Most families watch the coins sit on-chain, visible on a block explorer, unreachable forever.
What I Now Build for Every Crypto Family
After Tom, I rewrote how I practice. Every family that hires me for digital-asset estate planning leaves with three things a standard estate plan does not include.
First, an Executor's Playbook. A written, printed, offline-available document that lists every wallet, every exchange account, the approximate holdings, the access method, the cost basis, and the first five steps a successor should take. Updated annually. Stored in a location the successor knows how to find. It is the single most important gift a crypto holder can leave the person who will be administering their estate.
Second, a seed-phrase custody plan that is actually tested. Not a vague intention to "put the seed somewhere safe." A documented, rehearsed plan for where the seed phrase lives, who has access to reconstruct it, and what happens if the primary custodian dies first. There are several reasonable approaches — safe deposit boxes, split custody using Shamir's Secret Sharing, attorney escrow, or trust-integrated metal backups — and the right one depends on the size of the holding, the family's technical comfort, and the successor trustee's capabilities.
Third, a trust-integrated digital-fiduciary designation. The person who is best suited to administer your general estate is often not the same person who is best suited to operate a hardware wallet. Your estate plan can — and should — name a separate digital fiduciary with specific, expanded authority over digital assets under Texas Estates Code Chapter 2001, while leaving your general executor in charge of the rest.
The Reason I Tell This Story
I am telling this story in public because I do not want it to happen to your family. If you hold crypto — any amount large enough that it would matter if your spouse could not access it — the planning you need is both more specific and more personal than what most estate planning attorneys have ever had to think through.
I have thought through it. I have lived through it. I would be honored to help you plan for it, so your family does not have to.
Carla Alston is an estate planning and tax attorney at WG Law. She practices out of McKinney and Southlake and focuses on special needs planning, digital-asset estate planning, and tax-smart estate planning. To schedule a consultation, contact us or call 214-250-4407.