What Happens to Your Cryptocurrency When You Die in Florida

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 leaves "all my property" to his wife and two sons, and he assumed that sentence covered everything. It did not. His family could not find 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, his will gave no direction on digital assets at all, and the single most valuable thing he owned was one lost slip of paper away from disappearing for good.

Ray is fictitious, but the gap is not. Cryptocurrency breaks the assumptions that ordinary estate plans are built on. There is no bank to call, no branch to subpoena, and no customer-service line that can reset a self-custody wallet. If the keys die with you, the coins die with you. After 30 years of estate work, these are the five things that actually decide whether your crypto reaches the people you meant it for.

1. Your will transfers ownership, not access

A will decides who inherits. It does not, by itself, grant your personal representative the authority to reach a digital account, and it does nothing at all to recover a wallet no one can open. Florida's answer to the first problem is Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes, the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. It gives fiduciaries a legal path to your online accounts. A personal representative can generally obtain a catalog of electronic communications and the other digital assets without special wording, but access to the content of electronic communications requires your consent (in a will, another document or a provider's online tool) or a court order, and a direction you give through a provider's online tool can override your will. A will that disposes of "all my property" says nothing about access to digital assets, so the crypto-specific language is worth writing in on purpose.

2. Self-custody keys die with you unless someone can find them

A self-custody wallet (a hardware device, a software wallet, a paper backup) is controlled entirely by its private key or recovery phrase. Whoever holds the phrase holds the coins; whoever cannot find it is locked out permanently, with no reset and no appeal. The planning problem is a paradox: your family must be able to find the keys when they need them, but the keys must never sit anywhere a thief, a houseguest, or a probate file could reach them first. That is a design problem, and it is solvable, but only if you solve it before it matters.

3. Never put the keys in the will itself

This is the mistake that undoes careful people. A will admitted to probate in Florida becomes a public court record. Write your seed phrase or private key into it and you have effectively published the combination to your safe to anyone willing to pull the file. Access instructions belong in a separate, secured document (a sealed letter of instruction, a password manager with a documented succession path, or split instructions held by different trusted people) that your estate plan references without ever reproducing the secret. The will points to the keys. It never contains them.

4. Exchange accounts follow their own order of operations

Coins on an exchange such as Coinbase or Kraken are a different animal from self-custody. You do not hold the keys; the platform does, and its tools and terms matter. Under Chapter 740, a provider reads three sources in a fixed order: its own online tool, if it offers one (such as an account-access or legacy-contact setting that you can change or delete at any time), then your estate documents, and the terms of service only if the first two are silent. A legacy-contact or account-access setting you chose years ago can quietly override what your will says. Not every exchange offers one, so check what yours actually provides. So set any such designations deliberately, make sure they match your will, and put a clear direction about digital assets in your will so the platform's default terms do not decide the question. Even then, expect the exchange to ask for letters of administration, and possibly a court order, before it moves a satoshi.

5. Plan for incapacity, not just death, and keep the inventory current

A will does nothing while you are alive but unable to act. If a stroke or an accident leaves you incapacitated, the person managing your affairs is better served by a durable power of attorney that expressly covers digital assets and cryptocurrency, because under Chapter 740 an agent can reach the content of your electronic communications only if the document expressly grants that authority. Without it, your agent can hit the same wall your heirs would. And because wallets, exchanges, and balances change, the whole plan rests on a maintained inventory: what you hold, where it lives, and how (not what) to access it. A plan built once and never updated ages badly in a space that reinvents itself every couple of years.

Where Ray's plan ended up

Ray's fix was not a full teardown of his estate plan; it was a focused update. Digital-asset and cryptocurrency provisions went into his will and his durable power of attorney under Chapter 740. A secure access plan for the hardware wallet was built so his wife could reach the recovery phrase without it ever touching the will or a public file. He listed his wallets and exchange accounts himself and set the exchange's settings to match his will, so every document pointed the same direction. Together, the documents and the access plan addressed the gap that would have cost his family everything.

For the broader framework, see the article on the five documents that decide who controls your digital estate, and the related piece on why your executor may not be able to access your digital assets.