What happens to your digital assets when you die?

The average person in 2025 has between 100 and 200 online accounts. Some of those accounts hold real monetary value, from cryptocurrency wallets and gaming inventories to domain portfolios and digital storefronts. Others hold irreplaceable sentimental value, like cloud photo libraries and social media archives.

The gap between physical and digital estate planning

Traditional estate planning covers physical property, bank accounts, and investment portfolios. But most wills and trusts were never designed to handle a Steam inventory worth $15,000, a cryptocurrency wallet secured by a hardware device in a drawer, or a domain portfolio generating recurring revenue.

When someone dies without digital estate planning, their beneficiaries face a fragmented, often impossible recovery process. Each platform has different policies. Some allow legacy contacts, others require probate court orders, and many simply lock accounts permanently after a period of inactivity.

What types of digital assets are at risk?

• Cryptocurrency wallets (hardware and software) - recovery phrases are critical and time-sensitive
• Gaming inventories (CS2, Fortnite, Roblox) - often worth thousands, locked to individual accounts
• Domain names - expire and become available to the public if not renewed or transferred
• Digital storefronts - Etsy, Shopify, and other businesses that generate ongoing revenue
• Cloud storage - photos, documents, and creative work stored in Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox
• Social media - some platforms offer memorialization, others delete accounts
• Subscription services - ongoing charges to credit cards that no one cancels
• Email accounts - often the key to recovering all other accounts

Why traditional methods fall short

Writing passwords in a notebook might seem practical, but it creates serious security risks during the months or years someone is still alive. Sharing credentials with a family member introduces unauthorized access concerns. And most digital assets require more than just a password, they need step-by-step instructions specific to each platform.

Building a digital estate plan

An effective digital estate plan does three things: it catalogs your digital assets with enough detail for someone else to act on, it provides secure access to recovery information only when needed, and it gives clear instructions for what should happen to each asset.

This is exactly what services like Carryr are designed to do. Rather than trying to retrofit physical estate planning tools for digital assets, a purpose-built digital executor service can handle the unique challenges of encrypted credentials, platform-specific transfer processes, and time-sensitive recovery windows.