Hypothetical scenario: Ray is a retired business owner in Jacksonville who moved most of his savings into cryptocurrency over the last decade. He holds Bitcoin and Ethereum in a self-custody hardware wallet and keeps a smaller balance on an exchange. His will, drafted years earlier, leaves "all my property" to his wife and two sons, and he assumed that one sentence covered everything. It did not. His family had never seen the twenty-four-word recovery phrase for the hardware wallet, the exchange would not release the account to anyone without letters of administration or another court order, the will gave no direction on digital assets at all, and the single most valuable thing he owned was one misplaced slip of paper away from vanishing. He came in with a narrow question: did his will handle his crypto? The real answer was that almost nothing about it was set up.
The gap was structural, not careless. Cryptocurrency breaks the assumptions an ordinary will is built on: there is no bank to subpoena and no way to reset a self-custody wallet. If the keys are lost, the coins are lost, and a will that transfers ownership does nothing to deliver access.
How the hypothetical was resolved
The fix was a focused update, not a teardown. The work rebuilt the plan around the five things that actually decide whether crypto survives its owner:
- The wallet access protocol. A private, complete list captured every wallet, device, and exchange account (what it was, where it lived, and who held the keys) so nothing depended on memory.
- Chapter 740 provisions. Digital-asset and cryptocurrency language was added to the will and the durable power of attorney under Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, so the documents themselves directed disclosure to his fiduciaries at death and during incapacity alike.
- A secure access plan for the keys. The recovery phrase was kept entirely out of the will, which would have become a public probate record, and placed in a separate, secured plan that Ray's wife could reach when she needed it and no one else could reach before.
- Exchange settings. The key management guidance told him to check his exchange's access or legacy-contact settings, if it offered any, and keep them consistent with the will, so a years-old setting could not quietly override the plan.
- A plan that needs refreshing. The guidance recommended a yearly review, because wallets, platforms, and balances change faster than the rest of an estate.
Why that changed the outcome
In the hypothetical, Ray's family could reach what he left them: the exchange account released once his personal representative presented the letters and the direction his documents now carried, and the hardware wallet was recoverable because the keys were findable by the right person and no one else. The illustrative point is structural. None of the risk came from the coins; it came from the distance between owning crypto and planning for it: a will that transferred value but not access, keys no one could find, and settings pointing the wrong way. The cheapest moment to close that gap is while you are alive to answer the questions.