From Digital Ownership to Digital Asset Continuity

Abstract

Direct control of a digital asset does not ensure that control can survive death, incapacity, key loss, or prolonged inactivity. This narrative evidence review distinguishes ownership from continuity and examines four layers that must remain aligned: legal entitlement, technical control, current intent, and operational execution. Evidence from digital-inheritance law, platform policies, and a 2025 blockchain-based digital-will prototype shows why a private key, will, smart contract, custodian, or inactivity timer is insufficient alone. The paper proposes a continuity-policy model built around revocable instructions, bounded roles, event verification, delay, auditability, and failure handling. It does not claim a universal legal solution. The principal finding is conceptual: continuity is a lifecycle property of a governed system, not an attribute automatically conferred by digital ownership.

Keywords: digital asset continuity; digital inheritance; private keys; digital estate; revocable instructions; blockchain automation

Research question

Why does direct ownership of digital assets fail to ensure continuity following death, incapacity, loss of access, or prolonged inactivity?

Introduction

A person can hold an asset directly and still leave no usable path for anyone to preserve it, transfer it, or carry out a valid instruction after an adverse event. This is especially visible with cryptographic assets. Control may be compressed into a private key or recovery phrase. The same arrangement that limits third-party interference during life can become an absolute barrier after key loss or death.

The inverse problem occurs in custodial systems. Recovery may be possible, but the owner depends on the provider’s identity process, policies, jurisdiction, solvency, and willingness to recognize a successor. Technical access and legal entitlement may diverge in either model.

Continuity is therefore not synonymous with transfer. It is the ability to preserve an owner’s valid policy across time and exceptional events while preventing premature or unauthorized execution.

Background and literature

Farooqui, Sharma, and Gupta (2022) analyze posthumous rights and platform policies for social-media assets in the United States and India. Their review shows that digital assets are heterogeneous: communications, photographs, accounts, licensed media, intellectual property, and monetary claims do not share one inheritance rule. Platform terms can also determine whether an account is memorialized, deleted, or made available to a representative.

The 2025 TrustForWills paper by Hernando-Corrochano, Pastor-Vargas, and Hernández-Berlinches proposes a blockchain architecture for digital legacy. It distinguishes end users and executors, connects smart contracts to external services, and reports exploratory testing by approximately 750 users. The authors also acknowledge unresolved and changing legal conditions and simulate death or incapacity triggers through an administrator action.

These sources support two conclusions without proving more. First, digital legacy requires roles, evidence, and integration beyond a ledger entry. Second, a prototype can demonstrate workflow and software feasibility without establishing legal enforceability, production security, or accurate real-world event verification.

Review approach

This paper uses a narrative evidence review and comparative architecture analysis. It examines selected local academic sources in full, current primary technical documentation, and platform/legal observations only within their stated jurisdictions. It does not conduct an empirical study of estates or estimate the prevalence of lost assets. Design implications are author interpretation rather than reported source findings.

Conceptual framework

Continuity requires four aligned layers.

Entitlement identifies who has a legal claim or recognized authority. Blockchain possession cannot settle every question of inheritance, marital property, trusts, licenses, creditor rights, or tax.

Control identifies who can technically perform an action. A key holder may have control without entitlement. An heir may have entitlement without the key.

Intent identifies the owner’s current, sufficiently specific instruction. A signature created years earlier may be authentic but revoked, superseded, or inapplicable after circumstances change.

Execution identifies how and when the action occurs. It includes triggers, data sources, executors, transaction fees, monitoring, and recovery.

A continuity system fails when any layer is missing or when it silently substitutes one for another.

Direct ownership and private-key dependency

Self-custody removes a custodian’s unilateral control but gives the owner a credential that the network treats as authority. Networks do not ordinarily distinguish an owner, thief, heir, or finder who can produce the same valid signature.

Sharing a recovery phrase in advance weakens security. Concealing it perfectly can make recovery impossible. Splitting a secret across trusted parties may reduce one risk while creating coordination, coercion, and availability risks. Social recovery and multisignature arrangements distribute authority, but their governance must define replacement, collusion, and incapacity.

The appropriate conclusion is not that self-custody is defective. It is that custody and continuity solve different problems.

Custodial and non-custodial continuity

A custodian can verify documents, freeze activity, and update account access. Those capabilities may help after death or incapacity. They also subject the owner to account terms, service continuity, legal process, and operational risk.

A non-custodial contract can encode beneficiaries, delays, and spending conditions without giving one service general custody. Yet it may depend on an executor, oracle, front end, upgrade key, or token issuer. Schär’s analysis of DeFi shows that admin keys and external data frequently reintroduce trust into nominally decentralized protocols.

Neither model is universally superior. Continuity design should disclose which party can block, change, or execute an instruction and what happens if that party disappears.

Inactivity is an ambiguous event

Prolonged inactivity may reflect death, incapacity, imprisonment, device loss, deliberate cold storage, or a choice not to transact. Treating it as proof of death confuses a technical observation with a legal and factual conclusion.

An inactivity rule is safer as an escalation trigger. It can request a renewed check-in, notify designated contacts, begin a waiting period, and collect independent evidence. Automatic asset movement should require stronger conditions than one expired timer.

This staged model also supports revocation. The owner can cancel during the delay, rotate a delegate, or change a beneficiary without replacing the entire custody structure.

Persistent and revocable instructions

A continuity instruction should identify assets or scopes, beneficiaries or authorized roles, conditions, limits, expiry, and revocation. It should have a version and a history so reviewers can determine which instruction was active.

Persistence does not mean immutability of the owner’s decision. An immutable old instruction can be less faithful than a revocable current one. The evidence that an instruction existed should be durable; the authority it grants should be capable of lawful change.

Separation of roles reduces concentrated risk. A notifier may report an event. A verifier evaluates evidence. An executor submits an eligible transaction. A guardian may pause. None necessarily needs unrestricted authority.

Verification and governance

Death and incapacity are off-chain facts. A contract needs a recognized party or data process to attest to them. The source may be a public registry, professional representative, court, medical process, or multi-party review, depending on applicable law. Each option introduces errors, delay, privacy concerns, and jurisdictional limits.

Governance should state:

• who can register and challenge evidence;
• how conflicting claims are handled;
• what waiting period applies;
• whether execution can be paused;
• how keys and roles are replaced; and
• where a legal dispute can interrupt technical execution.

Auditability should record decisions and state changes without placing wills, identity documents, or private communications permanently on a public ledger.

Failure scenarios

A useful architecture begins with failure.

If the owner loses the revocation key, can authority be recovered without allowing a guardian to seize assets? If the executor goes offline, can another executor submit the same bounded action? If an oracle sends a false event, is there a challenge delay? If a beneficiary address is compromised, can it be updated? If the asset is frozen by its issuer, does the system report failure rather than claiming completion?

Other failures are legal. The instruction may conflict with a later will, a court order, creditor rights, or local succession law. A contract cannot make these conflicts disappear by executing first.

Design and policy implications

Continuity systems should treat on-chain execution as one layer within a larger policy. They should minimize secrets shared before an event, make instructions revocable, distinguish notification from proof, impose delays on high-impact actions, and preserve an auditable version history.

Interfaces should show the current policy, its dependencies, last owner confirmation, active delegates, and failure state. Users should not be told that a timer “guarantees inheritance.”

Policy makers and service providers should distinguish access to content, control of an account, ownership of an asset, and authority to transfer. One uniform category of “digital asset” obscures material differences.

Comparative architecture analysis

The principal continuity models distribute trust differently rather than eliminating it. A custodian can restore account access after identity and estate checks, but the user depends on its solvency, records, jurisdiction, and recognition of the claimant. A single-key model removes that recovery path: it provides strong control while the key remains available, but loss, destruction, or coercive disclosure may be irreversible.

Multisignature custody separates authority among keys. A two-of-three design can tolerate one lost key, and one key may be held by a recovery party. Yet the threshold states only how many signatures are required. It does not establish why a signer should act, whether a beneficiary is legally entitled, or how a dispute should be paused. Collusion remains possible, while key rotation and replacement become governance events.

Social recovery substitutes designated guardians for an institutional custodian. It can improve usability, but guardian availability, collusion, phishing, and changing relationships become part of the security model. Recovery therefore needs delay, notification, cancellation, and guardian rotation rather than only a threshold vote.

A dead-man switch treats missing activity as a trigger. Inactivity may instead reflect travel, illness, detention, device loss, deliberate disengagement, or a failed monitoring service. A false positive may transfer assets from a living owner; a false negative can leave beneficiaries waiting indefinitely. Inactivity is safer as the opening of a staged review with repeated owner notification, a challenge period, independent evidence, and bounded executor authority—not as proof of death or incapacity.

Smart-contract inheritance can make timing rules and state transitions observable. The prototype evaluated by Hernando-Corrochano and co-authors shows how roles can be encoded, but its death or incapacity trigger was simulated. A contract can enforce the result of an input; it cannot determine whether the off-chain event is true, legally sufficient, or undisputed. The oracle, administrator, or attesting institution remains a trust dependency.

Policy lifecycle and beneficiary acceptance

Continuity should be modeled as a lifecycle. Creation records the assets or permissions in scope, beneficiary, trigger class, verification rule, delay, and authority of each role. Maintenance covers key rotation, beneficiary changes, asset migration, upgrades, and periodic confirmation. Triggering begins an evidentiary process. Execution transfers only the permitted assets after conditions and delay are satisfied. Closure records completion, rejection, cancellation, or failure.

Beneficiary acceptance matters. A beneficiary may be unable or unwilling to receive an asset because of sanctions, tax, custody, technical, or legal constraints. Sending to an unverified address can be irreversible. Acceptance should confirm the destination, control of that destination, and applicable eligibility without publishing private estate information.

The design also needs rejection and dispute paths. If verification fails or a beneficiary declines, the policy must say whether authority returns to the owner, moves to a contingent beneficiary, or enters human review. A refund is possible only while an account or contract still controls the asset. After final settlement, recovery normally requires a new transaction from the recipient or a legally enforceable off-chain process.

Coercion, privacy, and persistent policy design

An attacker may coerce an owner to change a beneficiary, compromise guardians, forge evidence, censor notifications, or exploit an executor. A malicious beneficiary may accelerate a trigger. Conversely, a compromised owner device may cancel a legitimate process. These threats create tension between fast recovery and meaningful challenge.

Delay creates time for detection and cancellation but also postpones access for legitimate beneficiaries. High-risk changes can use longer delays than routine maintenance. Multiple notification channels and an auditable state transition improve detection, provided the record does not expose identities, relationships, documents, or balances.

On transparent ledgers, publishing a beneficiary address early can reveal a relationship and create a target. Sensitive evidence should remain off-chain; only commitments or status assertions should be placed on-chain where necessary. Disclosure should be limited to authorized decision-makers.

A persistent non-custodial policy should separate powers. A scheduler can open a review window without transfer authority. An evidence provider can attest to a condition without choosing the beneficiary. An executor can submit a valid transition without changing its destination or amount. Revocation should invalidate queued execution, rotate compromised permissions, and preserve an audit record. Emergency pause can contain an incident, but its controller can also censor execution, so pause authority needs scope, expiry, and review.

These implications are relevant to Praxifi's design context but do not prove that any Praxifi implementation is secure, lawful, or effective. Product-level claims would require separate threat modeling, jurisdictional review, code audit, and production evidence.

Future research

Future work should compare false-trigger rates, recovery time, beneficiary failure, cancellation success, guardian availability, privacy leakage, and loss under compromised roles. Legal research should distinguish asset classes and jurisdictions. Technical evaluations should test oracle failure, chain reorganization, executor censorship, key rotation, upgrades, and incomplete beneficiary onboarding.

Longitudinal evidence is especially limited. Prototype usability does not show that owners will maintain instructions for decades or that beneficiaries can recover assets after platforms, standards, and addresses change. Continuity is a maintenance problem across time, not a one-time deployment.

Operational continuity across changing systems

Long-lived instructions must survive more than the owner's absence. Wallet software may disappear, a chain may split, a token may migrate, an issuer may redeem an instrument, or a custodian may change its recovery policy. An instruction that names only one contract address can remain technically valid while becoming economically meaningless. Continuity therefore requires an inventory that links the owner's intended economic interests to their current technical representations and records how substitutions are approved.

This does not justify giving a service unrestricted power to discover and move every asset. Discovery and execution should remain separate. A monitoring service may identify a new representation or an expired dependency, but the owner should confirm material scope changes while able to do so. If automatic migration is permitted, the policy should constrain eligible replacements, maximum values, approved issuers, and the evidence that connects the old asset to the new one.

Operational rehearsals can reveal failures before a real event. A dry run can test whether notifications arrive, guardians respond, beneficiary addresses remain controlled, and the executor can construct a valid transaction without broadcasting it. Rehearsal results should not expose secrets or create a reusable signed transaction. They should record dependency health and the date of the last successful check.

The cost of maintenance also matters. A design that requires frequent on-chain updates may become unusable when fees rise. A design that stores all state with one provider may fail when that provider closes. Hybrid systems can keep private, changeable information off-chain while anchoring only the policy identifier, version commitment, and critical state transitions. That approach reduces public disclosure but makes off-chain availability and integrity part of the threat model.

Comparative evaluation criteria

Continuity proposals should be compared against explicit criteria rather than the presence of a blockchain. The first criterion is recoverability: which failures can the system survive without granting an actor unilateral control? The second is fidelity: how confidently does execution reflect the owner's latest valid instruction? The third is contestability: can an erroneous or fraudulent trigger be detected and stopped? The fourth is maintainability: can keys, recipients, assets, and dependencies change without rebuilding the entire arrangement?

Privacy, cost, and legal operability complete the comparison. A transparent state machine may improve auditability while exposing family relationships. A heavily mediated design may fit existing legal processes while recreating a single point of failure. A fully autonomous design may reduce delay but execute before a court or affected party can intervene. No architecture dominates across all criteria; the appropriate balance depends on asset type, value, jurisdiction, owner capacity, and the consequences of an incorrect transfer.

These trade-offs also explain why “non-custodial” is not a complete risk description. A service can lack the ability to transfer assets unilaterally while still controlling the interface, scheduler, oracle selection, upgrade process, or notification channel. Users need a dependency map that states what each actor can do, what happens when it disappears, and which recovery path remains available.

Open questions for law and system design

Several questions remain unresolved. How should a system reconcile an on-chain instruction with a later off-chain will? What evidence should suspend an automated transfer without enabling indefinite censorship? Can a beneficiary prove eligibility without revealing identity or estate details publicly? Who bears loss when an attestation is accurate in form but wrong in fact? How should a policy handle assets whose issuer freezes, redeems, or replaces the token during the owner's inactivity?

Research also needs to examine unequal capability. Owners and beneficiaries may not understand key custody, transaction fees, or chain selection. A system that is secure for an expert may fail for a family member encountering it for the first time during a crisis. Accessibility, assisted recovery, clear explanations, and bounded professional help are therefore part of continuity, not merely interface refinement.

Limitations

The review is selective rather than systematic. Local legal sources emphasize the United States, India, Spain, and Europe, and cannot be generalized globally. The TrustForWills evaluation is a prototype study with simulated event triggering. No estate outcomes, security replication, or legal enforceability tests are presented here. The paper does not provide estate- planning advice.

Conclusion

Ownership answers who holds a claim or credential now. Continuity asks whether a valid policy can survive a change in the owner’s capacity without allowing someone else to act too early.

Private keys, custodians, wills, smart contracts, and inactivity timers each solve part of that problem. None aligns entitlement, control, intent, and execution alone. A credible continuity system combines revocable instructions, bounded roles, verified events, delay, auditability, and explicit failure handling.

Owner sovereignty should not require operational fragility. It should include the power to define, inspect, change, and safely terminate the policies that outlive routine interaction.

References

1. Farooqui, Mohammad Owais, Bhavna Sharma, and Dhawal Gupta. 2022. “Inheritance of Digital Assets: Analyzing the Concept of Digital Inheritance on Social Media Platforms.” Novum Jus 16(3): 413–435. https://doi.org/10.14718/NovumJus.2022.16.3.15
2. Hernando-Corrochano, Jesus, Rafael Pastor-Vargas, and Roberto Hernández-Berlinches. 2025. “Trusted wills for digital assets using blockchain: a practical case.” Blockchain: Research and Applications 6: 100289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100289
3. Schär, Fabian. 2021. “Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets.” https://doi.org/10.20955/r.103.153-74

Conflict disclosure

PraxiHub is associated with Praxifi. The author may hold roles or ownership interests in Praxifi, whose broader research interests include digital-asset continuity and constrained automation. This relationship may create a potential conflict. The analysis does not validate or recommend a Praxifi product.

Publication history

Draft version 0.1, prepared 2026-07-30. Not peer reviewed.