Sign New Jersey Banking Last Will And Testament Computer

Industry sign banking new jersey last will and testament computer

thank you for joining today's webinar we're excited to cover a topic that i believe is woefully underexplored and something that many of us struggle with personally digital inheritance this event is sponsored by vault 12 who has recently joined the chamber of digital commerce and delivers a security solution for protecting digital assets such as cryptocurrency seed phrases i'm excited to introduce jason letterman who is an associate a senior associate at norton rose fulbright a valued chamber member where he focuses on providing counsel to high net worth individuals and clients concerning all aspects of estate planning and trust administration jason is going to chat about important considerations as it relates to estate planning jason over to you thank you patrick hi everybody and good afternoon my name is jason letterman and i'm a senior associate in the trust and estates department at norton rose fulbright in new york city i'm admitted to practice law in new york new jersey and florida i specialize in creating and implementing estate planning and tax saving plans for high net worth individuals a good portion of my practice is devoted to cryptocurrencies and uh folks who have accumulated them and would like to know how to pass them on to their children or uh or other folks in their lives um there's a there's an interesting quip about t e lawyers that we're the world's only surviving traditional lawyers and um we are traditional in the sense that while we specialize in complex tax issues trust administration probate matters we need to know a little bit about everything or almost everything if our clients own real estate we need to know something about real estate law if our clients own cryptocurrencies or our crypto investors or our crypto creators we need to learn about these assets how they work and how they can be transmitted from one generation to the next and so i've been asked to give a few introductory remarks concerning the subject of digital inheritance i'd like to thank the chamber of digital commerce and vault 12 for asking me to join you here today in uh in the short time that we have i'd like to just give you a basic sense of how assets and more specifically cryptocurrencies are dealt with in the probate process and perhaps leave you with a few fundamental important ideas to keep in mind when thinking about your digital estate plan the first thing to note is that each state in each country has its own rules there's no one-size-fits-all approach to estate planning or thinking about planning with your digital assets this is particularly true when it comes to cryptocurrency several states including new york and florida have passed laws to try and deal with the ever-changing digital asset landscape in these states it's generally clear that a fiduciary in other words usually an executor of an estate or a trustee of a trust has the ability to control certain digital assets that once belonged to someone else unfortunately or fortunately digital assets and cryptocurrencies continue to change and so even legislators that try and keep pace have a tendency to fall behind as a result there are enormous gaps in the law when it comes to digital inheritance perhaps it goes without saying but i'll say it anyway if you're dealing with inheritance questions surrounding digital assets you need to consult a lawyer who understands this stuff the field of inheritance law is one of the oldest most antiquated most ceremonial areas in legal practice and when you add in the complexities of cryptocurrencies there are many traps for the unwary there's no substitute for competent advice in estate planning and there's no substitute for competent advice especially when it comes to cryptocurrencies there are a lot of foot faults with that said i'd like to just take one moment and give some general background on the probate process and terminology generally speaking when a person passes away with a will he or she is known as having died having died testate if a person dies without a will he or she has died in testing when someone writes a will he or she has the opportunity to designate his or her executor in the will the process essentially is as follows when somebody passes away the will is presented for probate which is essentially the process of proving that the will is what we think it is the last will and testament of the testator in that proceeding the executor is officially named by the probate court as previously noted the executor is a fiduciary in other words the executor is tasked with carrying out the wishes of the testator the writer of the will as expressed in the will he or she owes fiduciary duties to the beneficiaries of the estate these are enforceable rights one of the primary functions of the executor is to gather the assets of the estate or marshal the assets as some lawyers say pay creditors and tax authorities and then distribute the remaining assets to the beneficiaries of course the executor will need to know what assets exist in order to do this which brings us to perhaps the most important and easiest part of the estate planning process that a lot of people actually miss and that is creating an inventory of what you own and what you owe an estate inventory which we sometimes refer to as a personal net worth statement should be detailed and it should provide information about how to access assets for traditional assets this inventory would include bank account information approximate balances a description of interests and entities that you own attendant rights to those interests real estate today this inventory may include private keys keywords passphrases passwords and logon information all of which as everybody on this call i'm sure knows is extremely sensitive the problem here is writing this information down and leaving it in a folder in your home exposes your assets to a direct risk the security issues presented with cryptocurrencies are much more significant than with than with other assets because mere knowledge of the keys is essentially a deed to the property ordinarily in the law we have external proofs of ownership such as a title document or an account name with your private keys or other sensitive digital information anyone who has them can take your assets and they may be transferred beyond the practical reach of any legal system almost immediately there are various approaches to dealing with this security challenge some people trust one or more business associates their named executor or another third party with their keys and passphrases information can be divided or encrypted to keep everyone honest others develop a safe deposit box methodology to store information like this whereby a key is left in an envelope with instructions for the executor it might involve encrypted documents stored on a hard drive and backed up to a cloud and there are of course various technological approaches to dealing with this security versus access problem as well as you will hear from wasim the takeaway is that you need a plan that is thought through you need a secure way to provide your fiduciaries access but without taking risk of loss the greatest catastrophe would be to spend a lot of time accumulating cryptocurrencies and thinking about how best to pass them to your beneficiaries only to lose them in the ether no pun intended due to an oversight or a contingency that was not spotted accordingly the ideal technical approach needs to have several attributes first it needs to be accessible so that you can update your data on an as needed basis and as it changes during your life second it needs to be secure so nobody else but you or your designees can access that data third it needs to be customizable to your needs and readily amendable so that you can revise appointments as they may change during your life fourth and perhaps most importantly there needs to be fail fail-safe measures in place to ensure that if something does go awry such as the untimely death of a designee or beneficiary your information cannot be irretrievably lost we've all heard stories about cryptocurrencies that have been completely lost because the keys were gone because the hard drive was was lost someplace significantly and also extremely extremely maybe also the most important part here is the plan needs to be continually maintained and re-analyzed in order to make sure that your current wishes are reflected a plan is only as good as its implementation now of course i'm describing to you an impossibly ideal plan an actual plan might involve several of these tools it might involve funding lifetime trusts revocable trusts or irrevocable trusts and imposing fiduciary obligations on the trustee of those trusts who can be tasked with legal illegal obligations to safeguard the cryptocurrencies uh it might involve a technological solution such as vault 12 or it might involve some elaborate combination these are really all tools at the disposal of an estate planning attorney and a client wishing to to solve these problems the real point is that if a person has accumulated substantial cryptocurrency assets he or she needs to sit down with advisors who understand these assets and who can build a decision tree and make sure that all aspects of the plan are fully developed with that i'll turn it back over to patrick so that we can talk a little bit more about the technological solutions that are available thanks a lot jason uh that that's super helpful framing especially for those of us who haven't lost their digital assets in a uh a tragic boating accident uh this next portion of the discussion i'm really excited about um i'm gonna turn it over momentarily to to assimilate at vault 12. um we've been having a lot of conversations with wasim the vault 12 team recently and have grown quite fond of um of the group there on our end uh one thing that i want to cover for the audience here is in this next segment we definitely want this to be an engaging discussion and to engender outcomes that that you're here for so i definitely want to encourage you to use the chat function or the the q a function here um to ask questions and we'll see him and phil will certainly try to address that throughout the remarks and then at the end in a q a period so uh please leverage that again we want this to be informative to you um we'll see i'll hand it over to you at this point great thanks very much patrick and thank you so much jason for joining us today and setting the scene we're going to hear uh back from you in a little bit um for the q a section so stay stay on the call um hi my name is uh wasim ahmad i am with vault 12. my background is in uh cryptography uh e-commerce those those kinds of areas i'm not a lawyer um both my brothers are lawyers so or they're barristers but uh so i do know the value of getting good legal advice and if there's one thing that you're going to hear uh from from all of us today is that you do need to get good legal advice to set up your your estate so uh with that i'm just gonna switch over to my slides i have a couple of slides that i'd like to go through um in describing uh vault 12 and what vault 12 is so um what is vault 12 so vault 12 is an app that we launched earlier in the year that secures your digital assets and it dramatically reduces the both the risk of accidental loss um and there's been many many cases of accidental loss uh in recent years with wildfly wildfires and flooding and those kinds of things as well as the threat of um criminal theft and the the technology works by leveraging uh a personal trusted network that you designate so people that you know to actually protect your assets so that they they are never stored in one place either in the cloud or locally they're actually distributed so so that's kind of the the the premise on top of which we have built a digital inheritance solution so i want to um i want to talk about sort of uh some some of the statistics that exist in this area of people who are very crypto savvy but how that correlates to whether they actually did their estate planning or not so a lot of people worry about dying you know having crypto assets and then dying with them without uh without a clear path to where they go and who can access them and so that number is very very high um and unfortunately only you know less than 25 percent um have a plan um and only you know seven percent have have created a will and one of the things that i found out when i was uh kind of researching uh you know to prepare for our launch last week was while you'd expect that there were lots of examples of older people dying maybe without a will or without making the appropriate arrangements for their cryptocurrency it actually turned out that the the biggest examples of um kind of bad bad scenarios we're all young people who for whatever reason had some kind of misfortune and passed away and no one could get hold of their private keys or their seed phrases and so we're locked out the the most i think the largest example is actually matthew mellon the heir to the melon bank uh fortune and he died at the age of 50. he had done a very good job of protecting his crypto assets which totaled about a billion dollars by dividing them up putting them in cold storage around the country in different people's names so from a security perspective he definitely thought through unfortunately from a leaving instructions perspective there are no instructions there's no way to backtrack and figure out how to get into those code storage accounts and so those uh that billion dollar of uh xrp is uh out of reach unfortunately so creating an estate plan creating whether it's a will or whether it's a living trust and we we will get into that at the end during the q a um is very very important so the question becomes well how you know how do people who have been investing in cryptocurrency and other digital assets what are they doing today and so what we find is that people leave instructions in the household somewhere so it could be a piece of paper it could be a folder um it it you know generally somewhere in the home office maybe in a home safe only 17 of people store stuff on on on their computers and um about the same on usb devices and then a very small proportion of people are putting uh their crypto asset keys or seat phrases um and and documenting them putting them in a safety deposit box um which is which is quite shocking as people have tended to put jewelry and gold and other types of assets in safety deposit boxes in the past so let's i want to kind of look at what some of the risks are and jason covered some of these things but i wanted to sort of uh go back and and sort of dramatize them a little bit so the first thing is you must have an inventory uh so that's that's that's one of the biggest tasks that uh end up happening after after investor passes away is figuring out where are all the assets what are they and and then how you know how do i get access to them so not only do you need uh not only do you need an inventory the inventory needs to be bang up to date and while in the last couple of years maybe it's been very clear that you're investing in bitcoin you're investing in ethereum all of a sudden this year we found we've we sort of entered into this phase where people are investing in all kinds of coins the whole defy area has created a rush to invest in lots of different types of assets and so it's important that all of those assets are in fact accounted for so having an up-to-date inventory is very very critical the second thing then is because of the nature of digital assets and cryptocurrency you need pretty detailed instructions of how to how to access uh those assets wherever they happen to be they might be on an exchange hopefully not because very often we see those exchanges getting hacked but they might be inside the software wallet or they might be inside a hardware wallet and both software and hardware wallets have complex procedures to access wallets uh or reinitialize wallets if you want to access them so having the instructions is really important being able to find the instructions is very important and of course the instructions need to be readable um so so that's you know all three of those things are very very important in terms of nce you have the key you kind of know what to do with it the the third aspect um is a it's kind of relating to the fact that many people will will will create an inventory and we'll document and then that information gets passed on to a number of people down the chain it could be lawyers it could be you know other other professionals that are involved in the planning process and unfortunately what that means is is that a lot of times information regarding your assets is sort of floating around and it's not necessarily always a 100 private and it really it really does need to be many people talk about multi-sig multi-signature wallets those kinds of scenarios where three people can have access to the the wallet and that is a great idea the the one disadvantage in this particular area is that people who participate in a multi-signature scheme can see what the assets are and so in a sense you're leaking what your what you know what your future requests may be and that you know in certain circumstances could lead to uh inappropriate behavior and then the fourth thing i wanted to kind of dramatize was safety deposit boxes um you know we've all grown up with safety deposit boxes uh but they are the first thing to get boosted when there's a bank heist but more seriously this year with the pandemic um i think we started to see the failing of physical centralized storage in that you can't you couldn't necessarily get into all the banks all the time i mean you still can't get into the bank but uh the safety deposit vaults um all the time you can get into them when the bank is open um safety deposit boxes often are moved around uh reordered etc and sometimes things get stolen and something sometimes things get misplaced um and so again if that's where you stored your private keys uh you're you're not necessarily uh you know gonna be recompensed for that in fact the insurance on uh safety deposit boxes is uh i think limited to not much more than five hundred dollars so the most famous people to use safety deposit boxes are the winklevoss brothers who are actually investors in vault 12 um but but anyway i'm going to talk about what they did so they they took their private keys they cut them up into strips put each strip inside uh a safety deposit box um at a regional bank that was 30 minutes from the airport and then both of them flew around the country and deposited these strips inside safety deposit boxes and that's great that's very secure these guys are not selling their crypto um they're in it for the long term but if you think about a pandemic scenario when they actually want to retrieve that um so uh i'm sorry if they want to uh retrieve that in the in the case of a pandemic that could be pretty complicated so safety deposits safety deposit boxes are not the be-all and end-all unfortunately so now i'm going to talk about what what 12 does and um i'm just going to highlight kind of where we created a process a simple process to make it easier to make sure that you have an inventory that it is up to date and that there is a very simple and easy direct way to transfer the assets from one person to another um and that that your assets and that process of transferring the assets is kept completely private so that no one really knows what or what those assets are except yourself we're gonna we're gonna jason introduced kind of some of the terminology around trust in the states and we're gonna talk about um beneficiaries and executors and trustees because they all have a different role to play in the legal process but in the vault 12 process um all that's required is to designate an individual who will receive access to the assets and then what they do with the assets is governed by your trust or your will or whatever the legal framework is governing your estate so it's a very simple process um you create a digital vault basically a digital safety deposit box you add assets to it um and adding an asset is as simple as typing in the seat phrase and then you designate a set of guardians who will guard that vault and the purpose of the guardians is they're people that you know so you're not dealing with impersonation or any of those kinds of things with anonymous anonymous participants that people that you know and trust they could be professionals that you know and trust uh so they could be your lawyer it could be a wealth manager um and what happens to the actual digital asset is that it gets encrypted and split and distributed to those people so they get a piece of it and so you might do this with 10 guardians or 20 guardians those guardians can also be devices and um no none of those people actually know what they're what they're guarding um unless you are explicit in the in the description um so it it can hide your uh your assets for you from that perspective so the idea is that as you buy new assets and you get new wallets and you have new private keys on different services you record those inside the vault they go in the vault not only is there an inventory that's up to date but everything is captured in there in in in real time the digital inheritance process very simple you choose one of the guardians it could be a son or a daughter or a uncle or an aunt and that person will be the person who will ultimately get access to the digital assets they'll get access to the keys or the seed phrases and be able to open those assets and distribute them the the process is very simple um we wanted to to sort of have something that uh declared who the who the designated individual was you know in a declaration so once you've designated the beneficiary the app will generate an agreement for you that you sign and then that can be sent to your lawyer it can be sent on to the uh to the beneficiary uh and anyone else so that records your intent to pass on those assets to this particular person and again it's it's it's passing on access to the assets who ultimately gets the assets really should be described in your in your legal in your legal uh documents and then when the time comes and the the beneficiary or the designated guardian needs to activate inheritance and get access to those assets it's a very simple process they activate the the transfer and obviously there's a couple of scenarios where this might happen obviously the scenario that we're talking about today is when someone is deceased but you could be incapacitated you could be incarcerated so there are maybe some other examples where a beneficiary might activate inheritance so we added some um some safeguards and uh the safeguards include making sure that the communication between people is not sort of via some messaging app that it happens because you've picked up the phone and called them so you need to know who your guardians are but when a vault is activated the owner also gets a notification so if if someone decides to try to get access to your assets before you're ready you can cancel the transaction if if you're around to do that so the key thing in our system is really picking the right guardians and we're going to have a little q a session in a minute and i think some of the some of the more complex scenarios that end up getting discussed revolve around choosing a enough guardians and then choosing the right number of guardians that need to issue approvals which you know could be 5 out of 10 or 3 out of 20. and making sure that you pick the right kind of people that will be able to do you know carry out your intentions essentially and this could involve everything from making sure you have guardians all around the world to making sure that your lawyer is part of that group making sure that there's a couple of devices that are set up as guardians that you control and keeping a safe at home uh any in all of those scenarios so once uh inheritance is activated uh the beneficiary in this case uh it's this young lady here uh dana uh who you'll see in the in the videos that we've made um she will need to contact the guardians and they will they will go through kind of a an approval process where they swipe to agree that someone is trying to or the right person is trying to access the assets and then the assets are recovered um and it's basically as simple as that it's a very simple approach to directly getting assets to the designated individual um this process is uh is is perfect for those scenarios where you have a lot of assets or a lot of changing assets so you so you get to have an up-to-date inventory it's completely private um and it's it's very direct um and if you want to change the beneficiary of the designated person you can change it it is not a replacement for your estate planning it's not a it's not a replacement for your will although you might want to store your will or a copy of your will in your digital vault but it works in conjunction with your digital estate planning and actually all of your all of your estate planning that can be even more complex so um very easy to uh to try this out you can download the app on vault12.com and you can sign up for a subscription and then you get a free trial and you can try it try out and see how the whole system works um so very very easy and we'll send you as a follow-up we'll send you um some videos so you can see the whole process in action um great so now um [Music] phil let's uh why don't you unmute yourself and then let's have uh let's have a little little conversation okay um so phil uh has been working with vault 12 he uh is uh uh our crypto lawyer and he has extensive experience um both in the in the legal area m a's he has worked uh with a number of of blockchain digital asset companies both on helping them list digital assets as well as working uh on legislation um that has uh uh gone through congress so i'm going to let you actually expand on that on that intro fill and then we can talk about some real life scenarios okay well um thanks wassim for that introduction and uh my name is phil berg and i'm the uh a partner at otterberg in new york city and i'm also the chairman of the corporate department and the privacy and cyber security practice group and uh have been it my interest in the crypto space is a product of having um you know been in the the cyber security piece of our um of our our corporate practice and uh it it is you know expanded into the areas that uh that was seen mentioned and we've also tried to be a partner with regulators and you know the u.s congress and trying to help move some kind of legislation through um or regulatory uh clarifications um uh in the united states which would be um quite helpful in making sure that uh investment in in this uh defy industry and in in the crypto space continues um in the united states um which does suffer a bit from having this regulated on a state-by-state basis or by uh simply by the sec's enforcement actions so that that has been interesting and um i guess with that i'll leave it to west seem to pick up on the questions great thanks so much phil so um so i've just gone through kind of a product presentation and uh jason at the beginning kind of went through kind of the landscape of what's what's involved and i thought we should uh talk a little bit about kind of a kind of some real real human scenarios of what what really happens and i don't know if you want to use yourself as an example um but uh what how how do you think uh i mean you know vault 12 pretty well so how do you think people are are actually going to go about using this well as as jason mentioned that the when something happens to someone that they dire income or incapacitated it's the it's the garnering the marshaling of assets and figuring out what's out there and figure out how to access those assets which is the most complex part and it's very much more so in its complexity when you're dealing with digital assets because uh real real estate assets there's one ledger on which one centralized ledger on which you know those a record of those assets is kept and it's easy to it's easy to get there figure out who owns it and the boundaries of that property and in financial assets kept with banks and things you know a uh trustee or executor could merely check the mail of the person who's passed and you'd eventually get monthly statements etc and be able to figure that out now with digital assets there's no there's no record on a public blockchain of who owns what assets um on that uh blockchain and um so without some place that just makes all of this available and um and then keeps it secure until the time after the person has passed and then allows the mechanism for moving it to the appropriate person either the beneficiary or the person who's gonna be the executor um to deal with the will um you know without that uh there's a good chance that some of these assets could be lost or you know not accessible um and uh you know jp morgan just recently came out saying that this is the this is a very important asset class that uh you know that should be seen as an alternative such you know a store of values such as uh the way we treat gold now so you know this could be become increasingly important and uh gold is generally easy to find in a safety deposit box wherever you might have it on digital assets not so much so in you know in in my case having you know having uh purchase some bitcoin back in the day and as it becomes more valuable you you have it in this you get in your vault and you would have a uh a will that would kind of direct where you would like this to go and would also say who the responsible person is after you pass for making sure that that's where it goes and um so i have the choice then that i would either pass it directly give access to those assets directly to the my partner the beneficiary or um pass those on to my little brother who's uh named in the in the will to um as the executor so that he can protect them while we go through the probate process and eventually pass them on to my partner now um if i get more complicated in an estate planning with with trusts and things then it would be a simple uh renaming of um of the beneficiary and in you know were there to be a dispute among family members or beneficiaries or whatever um because multiple people would say well there would be i was named the beneficiary with this declaration obviously the one that has the latest date would be the one that uh the one that the probate court would um presumably honor yeah i mean you raise an interesting point which is a at some point in your life you may set things up one way and then later as your circumstances change you may want to uh you know have a wheel that's more comfortable has a more complex nature to it and so you may be changing you know who the who the designated guardian is or who the actual beneficiary is at the will um and so the the this solution in conjunction with your will really defines who those people are and they don't have to be the same person um but you do need to think about what's defined in the will and what's defined in the app because one is simply a transfer and the other is a legal framework for uh for dealing with your estate yes and one of the aspects of this that you had mentioned earlier is the digital information that's stored in your vault does not exist on any of the guardians or your own um single device it's been it's been shouted in a way that that there is a minimum number of pieces of shards that have to somehow come together um through the voluntary you know actions of that number of guardians for that information to be reconstituted and without that threshold number um each of the people holding their vault 12 has absolutely zero chance of getting any of the information and and but but the minute that um the the minimum number of shards come together then 100 of the information becomes accessible so it's just a very it's very much a way that um you know protects the privacy and protects accessibility which are in the uh cyber security field people forget about accessibility sometimes you may have a really hard lockdown uh servers at at your law firm or whatever and it so you protected privacy but then there's a knockout of the power there in the building and no one can do their work for five days as they try and reconstruct this and lawyers these days do all of their work on you know on using the computer that accessibility is is a is a security concern just justice um just as powerfully so um the balance of of accessibility privacy and security with with this particular solution um seems to pretty squarely uh fit this unique fact set that we have when we're dealing with digital assets being inherited great so um jason why don't you come and join us and then let's have a look at some of the questions um there's quite a few questions that have come in um and uh if you have any other questions please please definitely post them and we'll try to get through them we have a few minutes to kind of cover cover those things so um i think this first scenario of you know is the will still required can this be used with a living trust uh do i need to consult a lawyer the answer to those questions is absolutely uh yes um this is not a legal uh document or a legal uh a replacement for the the legal planning and legal implementation that needs to be done um jason perhaps you can um i think you mentioned this at the beginning in your intro uh can that can the beneficiary be the executor or trustee or is it only the beneficiary like where where does it where does it fit and what are these different roles sure um so generally speaking when we set up a trust just to give an example there are a few different permutations here but a simple trust i create a document which is essentially a set of instructions um 40 or 50 pages contains all of the rights and obligations of a trustee the trustee is a third party could be my spouse could be my brother in some instances it could be myself where there's a set of instructions that lays out how i want the assets to be administered the beneficiaries of that trust are the people who benefit from it accordingly the the trustee as i noted is is a fiduciary the trustee has a legal obligation enforceable obligation can be sued by the beneficiaries um if if you are setting up a trust with uh cryptocurrency which is increasingly becoming common what you need to do is make sure that there's absolutely no gap in understanding that the title to the assets is being conveyed to the trustee in his capacity or her capacity as a trustee you don't want any sort of question or discrepancy when it comes to uh am i giving my friend who is the trustee these assets for himself or herself uh or am i giving it to them as qua trustee the way you would do this uh is you'd need to set forth in a document presumably in the trust instrument or you could use some other conveyance instrument such as an assignment to make very clear that those assets are coming in and as i pointed out earlier you're not dealing with an asset that has a legal title in a traditional sense you know if i want to give my home to a trust i want to create a trust uh for the benefit of my kids and i want to make a gift of a home that i have out in the hamptons uh it's a relatively simple matter to retitle that home uh using a deed put it into an entity form or directly in the name of such and such person as trustee of such and such trust you can't easily do that with cryptocurrency and so the first thing that's necessary is some sort of document of title simple assignment that would be done the second thing is on the technological end you must make sure that whatever vault 12 has on record dovetails exactly with those instructions and so that would be a matter of of accessing the technology and making sure that that it's that it's correct and that it's up to date um as you mentioned you know one of the challenges is these things change over time uh and so we often have people who set up trusts they name a trustee down the road things change the trustee is no longer competent or there's a falling out uh and and they change trustees and so it would be necessary to change the the uh vault 12 documentation to make sure again there's no lacuna that there's an exact dovetail between those um between those documents great so there's quite a few questions in the q a box so i'm i'm going to go through there most of them are related to vault 12 products i'm going to just run through them very quickly and then we'll come back and talk about um one of you can talk about tax um we're out of that we're not involved in that process i'll tell you that now okay um so let's see um what is the ideal number of guardians does this recommendation vary depending on the amount of digital assets i own so this is a really good question um and this is the answer to this is going to be different for for each of you um for basic casual crypto investors um you know it could be as simple as 10 guardians five of whom give the approval um that that kind of that's one of the defaults um but you could have as little as five guardians and three giving the approval but for larger uh yeah i mean it's it's not really the the magnitude of the assets that you're storing it's about how security conscious you are and you know what is your tolerance to risk um but let's say that you have you know uh a wallet that has a lot of a lot of uh bitcoin in there and you want to protect it and you want to do as much as as possible to make sure it remains secure but that at the right moment whether it's you trying to access it or whether it's your beneficiary that no matter what they can get access to it which is a critical critical thing especially when dealing with high net worth individuals so in that scenario the the vault can can handle you know you know 20 or more guardians and then you get to select the threshold number of how many approvals you need and so in talking with your tna lawyer as you do your estate planning you need to think through well how many of these devices maybe i should have five if five is the number of approvals you need maybe i should have five devices in a safety deposit box those devices could be um you know an old it could be a tablet it could be old iphones it could be just any any android or ios device that you have lying around um and so i have two two uh iphone 5s's that i use as devices and what that means is you have control over those devices so you don't need to talk to anyone else to get an unlock or to get a vault recovery but these need to stay somewhere very very safe so maybe they are in a safety deposit box and the key to the safety deposit box is with your executor the other guardians the remaining 15 maybe five of them should be family members close family members and another five could be trusted business contacts and another five could be you know friends of yours so you've distributed the protection of your vault among several groups that are trusted to you or have have some trust as part of them and known to you and that way you reduce your risks of ending up in a scenario where you you can't obtain the necessary confirmations so so that's kind of the the long answer to the ideal number of guardians it really does depend and you need to think through scenarios of what will happen in the future when you want to access and how many people do you need to go to to get approval um let's see is it possible to set certain conditions for when the digital inheritance can take place if for example i haven't logged in for one year um then is it possible for digital inheritance to automatically take place we haven't implemented that at this time um because it really is unclear what those trigger points could be um i think for the incarceration scenario it makes sense that if no one's heard from the owner for six months um that it might be something that that gets automatically uh triggered but um it's something that the technology could support in the future um let's see does vault 12 support all cryptocurrencies bitcoin ethereum etc so the vault itself is not tied to in any way to what the digital asset is so it could be anything it could be your medical report it could be your id it could be your bank account passwords it could be your private key or your seat phrase so it's completely independent and the vault is not um does not have custody of your assets so it simply contains the access the ex the access credentials for accessing that that digital asset so what is the maybe jason you could you could address this what is the scenario when you just have a will and it states in the will your digital assets are at an exchange can the executor contact the exchange that's a good question um so it it varies by stake some states as i mentioned have put into place legislation to deal with this issue what they say generally is you've got the ability as an executor to access any digital asset that was owned by the decedent that is a rather forward-thinking approach many states don't have this in place in those states you'd have to kind of reference the the law you'd have to take a look at what's happened in the case law whether you you'd have grounds to access it the the basic way of looking at um cryptocurrencies stored on an exchange is that it's nothing more than an asset owned by the decedent and all assets are subject to the dominion or the control of the executor um but again it's not necessarily going to happen without without a fight and it's not necessarily a foregone conclusion so you have to you have to reference the state law great should do you want to cover the tax or fill do you want to cover the tax question which is uh how how are these assets handled for inheritance tax purposes when they're passed on from baltimore's perspective is where independently lawyers have to deal with that sure sure so from an inheritance tax perspective what what i take that to mean is the estate tax just by way of general background each state is entitled to impose an estate tax some states do some states don't new york for example has an estate tax new jersey does not florida does not other states don't the the estate tax on the federal level is imposed regardless of what state you live in uh without going into the details um roughly 11 million dollars of assets will put you into the estate tax taxable category so if you've got less than that you generally don't have an issue at the federal level uh states again vary um from from an inheritance or a state tax perspective it's very clear that these digital assets are assets they are um to be accounted for on a form 706 which is the tax filing that's prepared in connection with the the estate tax um it's very clear that that it would be valued at the value as of the date of death so you'd figure out exactly how much it's worth in u.s dollars on the date that somebody dies and that would be the number that goes on the return unfortunately there's there's no way to to avoid that result what i can tell you is there are certain measures that are taken in order to maximize tax savings and so you can create certain trusts you can um do various things to make sure that those assets don't get taxed sooner rather than later and that certain exemptions that you do have can be applied for the long-term benefit of children sometimes this would involve gifting it would involve creating a trust in some other state sometimes for example a state like delaware has a statute that allows a trust to exist in perpetuity um other states florida you've got you've got a 360-year rule against perpetuities so um you can do things essentially to make lifetime gifts and do other planning to help to limit your estate tax exposure but to answer the question directly yes all of the principal value of your assets at your death are included great okay so we we are actually out of time so we're gonna end it there thank you so much jason thank you so much phil i'm gonna hand it back to patrick and just just that there are quite a few questions we really appreciate uh the engagement um i will go back and answer each of them um and uh and uh get get you answers kind of fire email thanks for seeing jason phil that was a really impressive conversation and there's clear demand for it to continue based on the amount of questions coming in here uh to enable that what i'm going to do following this call is we will send out a recording of this call to this list as well as a broader list of registrants and then we have a list of resources that wasim has provided that can help to address some of those questions but more importantly we'll also provide the information to kind of connect with the speakers here afterwards if one you want to learn more about vault 12 which seems obviously a wonderful point of contact there and if you're looking for additional you know legal advice in the space both phil and jason can make themselves available so we really appreciate everyone taking almost an hour to hang with us this afternoon and hope that you thoroughly enjoy the remainder of your days thank you