Israeli blockchain company Kirobo has launched an inheritance feature that serves as a crypto-native alternative to a Last Will & Testament. ETH and all other ERC-20 tokens are currently supported, with NFTs planned in future updates.

In December 2021, Kirobo originally created a product called Liquid Vault to be used for restoring access to crypto wallets. With Liquid Vault, users can define a secondary wallet for crypto to be sent to if they lose access to their primary wallet. The Liquid Vault uses “future conditional transactions”, transactions that are activated via conditions based on criteria like a specific time or ownership of a particular NFT.

Now, Kirobo is allowing users to use Liquid Vault to designate up to eight wallets to inherit funds after a certain time period.  Users can add funds to the Liquid Vault at any point, adjust the timing, and change beneficiaries. Before the user-specified time period is up, funds in the Liquid Vault are still usable and can interact with smart contracts.

“We see the Liquid Vault as an app store for future transactions so anyone can build with limitations that will not cause logic failure using our safety net,” Kirobo CEO Asaf Naim told The Defiant. Kirobo will soon be opening Liquid Vault’s ability to perform future conditional transactions to the web3 ecosystem via a proprietary API.

When most people open a bank account as adolescents, they don’t think about inheritance. Despite the fact that between 50-60% of Americans do not have wills, everything usually ends up working out just fine as the traditional finance sector has legal processes in place to deal with such issues.

“In the crypto space, it doesn’t work like that,” Naim told The Defiant.

Lose your keys, lose your crypto

Because of the complicated nature of crypto, when someone dies without passing on their crypto keys or tokens, their assets are oftentimes irretrievable. When billionaire Bitcoin maximalist Mircea Popescu suddenly died in July 2021, his funds were lost in limbo. There are currently a few other crypto estate planning options, but none utilize time-based smart contracts.

“One option is to share the seed phrase and private keys with your fiduciary. Another option for safe tracking is to place your crypto-assets and NFTs in custody, like a software application or hardware wallet,” wrote Emily Parker Beekman and Tracy Craig, two estate planning attorneys from law firm Mirick O’Connell.

The third option according to the pair is to go the old-fashioned route: passing off a list of your logins and passwords and hoping for the best.

Read the original post on The Defiant