The Cryptocurrency Nobody Could Reach Until One Note Saved It

The situation

Thalia had put off writing a will for years, the way a lot of small business owners do, telling herself there would be a quieter month to deal with it. She owned a hair salon in Guelph, employed two other stylists, and had spent a decade building the client list and equipment into something worth passing on properly rather than letting it dissolve into confusion. Her husband Kostas worked as a factory technician, and between the two of them they had built a modest but real estate: the salon and its goodwill, a house with a mortgage mostly paid down, some retirement savings, and a cryptocurrency holding Thalia had bought gradually over several years and mostly forgotten to mention to anyone.

What finally moved her off the fence was not the business. It was her aunt Genevieve, who died suddenly of a stroke that spring. Genevieve had also held cryptocurrency, a modest amount she had bought years earlier out of curiosity and never spent, and when her family went looking for a way to access it after her death, they found nothing — no written password, no note about which app or exchange held it, no hint of the recovery phrase that controls access to a cryptocurrency wallet. Her laptop was password protected too. Estate trustees, the people responsible for gathering a deceased person's assets and distributing them, have wide legal authority to collect what a person owned, but that authority is useless against a wallet secured by a private key nobody can find. There is no bank branch to call, no customer service line that can reset it, no court order that magics forgotten characters back into existence. If the key is gone, the value tied to it is generally gone too.

Genevieve's family spent weeks going through old emails, notebooks, and a battered address book before someone found a scrap of paper tucked into a birthday card that turned out to be part of the recovery phrase — enough of a lead, combined with a guessed password pattern from an old, reused login, to eventually get in. It worked, but only after real panic and a fair amount of luck. Thalia watched the whole process unfold from the sidelines and came away certain that luck was not a plan she wanted to rely on for her own estate.

The problem

When Thalia and Kostas came to Treadstone Law to draft their wills, the immediate legal problem was narrower than it first appeared: how do you leave someone cryptocurrency, or any other digital asset, in a way that is both legally valid and practically usable? A will names beneficiaries and appoints an estate trustee, but it is a public document once probated — filed with the court and, in many cases, accessible to interested parties. Writing a password or a recovery phrase directly into a will is one of the worst ways to protect it, since the will itself becomes the record of exactly what someone needs to steal it.

Digital assets also do not behave like the property most wills are built around. A house has a land registry entry. A bank account has a financial institution that will honour a grant of probate, the court document confirming an estate trustee's authority to act. Cryptocurrency has none of that. It exists as an entry on a distributed ledger, and control over it is defined entirely by whoever holds the private key or seed phrase, a specific sequence of words that regenerates access to a wallet. There is no institution to appeal to if the key is lost, and no institution to notify of a death that will freeze or transfer the asset on its own. Whoever holds the key controls the asset, full stop, whether that person is the rightful heir or a stranger who found a login taped under a keyboard.

Thalia's holding was not large by the standards of the wider crypto market, but set beside the salon, the house equity, and their retirement savings, it made up a meaningful slice of an estate that, taken together, was likely to be worth somewhere in the range of $300,000 to $600,000 once the business and property were accounted for. Losing it the way Genevieve's family nearly did would not have been catastrophic to that total, but it would have been an entirely avoidable loss, and Thalia wanted the plan built so that avoidable loss simply could not happen.

What we did

1. Drafted wills that referred to a separate memorandum rather than listing access details directly. Thalia and Kostas's wills identified digital assets, including cryptocurrency holdings, as part of the estate and gave their estate trustee express authority to access, manage, and transfer them, but the wills themselves contained no passwords, no seed phrases, and no account numbers. Instead, each will pointed to a separate, non-public memorandum kept outside the estate court file where that sensitive information could live and be updated without needing to touch the will itself.
2. Built a digital asset memorandum and explained how to keep it current. We helped Thalia prepare a written inventory of her digital holdings — which platforms and wallets she used, in general terms, and where the recovery information for each one was physically or digitally stored — along with instructions for keeping it updated as she added or moved holdings. We were clear that we were not in the business of custodying passwords ourselves; the memorandum's job was to tell her estate trustee where to look, using a method Thalia controlled and could update on her own timeline.
3. Recommended a secure storage method suited to her circumstances. For someone with a single modest holding and no appetite for complex technical tools, we discussed options ranging from a sealed envelope in a safety deposit box to a password manager with an emergency access feature, weighing the trade-off between security and the real risk of the information becoming unreadable or inaccessible if stored in a way too clever for anyone but Thalia herself to use. She chose a safety deposit box at her bank, jointly accessible to Kostas, holding a written copy of the recovery phrase.
4. Appointed an estate trustee with a clear map, not just legal authority. Thalia named Kostas as her primary estate trustee and her business partner at the salon as an alternate, and we made sure both understood, in plain terms, what a recovery phrase is, why it cannot be reset or recovered through any institution, and why guarding it during her lifetime mattered just as much as naming the right people in the will.
5. Folded the business into the same plan. Because Thalia owned the salon outright, we also addressed what should happen to the business itself — whether it should be sold, wound down, or transferred to her business partner — so that the estate trustee was not left improvising decisions about a working business at the same time as trying to track down digital accounts.

The outcome

Thalia and Kostas left with signed wills, each naming the other as primary beneficiary and estate trustee, and a digital asset memorandum stored separately and updated within weeks of any change to her holdings. The cryptocurrency itself was worth a modest sum relative to the whole estate, but the plan meant that if something happened to Thalia, Kostas would not be searching through old notebooks or guessing at reused passwords the way Genevieve's family had. He would know exactly where to look, and the estate trustee authority in the will would have something real to attach to.

The plan also caught something Thalia had not thought through on her own: her business partner, listed as alternate estate trustee, had no idea the salon's client management software and supplier accounts were themselves protected by a password only Thalia knew, separate from the cryptocurrency question entirely. That got added to the memorandum too, closing a gap that had nothing to do with crypto but would have caused the same kind of scramble if left unaddressed.

What made this a clean win, rather than a near miss caught halfway, was timing. Thalia acted while she was healthy, with no urgency forcing a rushed decision, which meant every choice — how to store the recovery phrase, who to name as trustee, how much detail to put in writing versus keep separate — could be made carefully and revisited later as her holdings changed. Genevieve's family got their aunt's cryptocurrency back through persistence and a fortunate scrap of paper. Thalia built a plan that did not depend on luck at all.

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