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Crypto-Wills: Transferring Digital Assets by Maintaining Wills on the Blockchain

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Communication and Intelligent Systems (ICCIS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 120))

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Abstract

Traditional methods of transferring assets post demise are tedious and problem-ridden. These methods do not account for the increasing variety of digital assets (including crypto-assets) present today. Hence, when a person dies, his/her tangible assets can be distributed according to his/her Will, or the prevailing legal framework. However, his/her digital assets are left inaccessible (due to their inherent security) and are, in turn, lost forever. In order to provide a reliable and secure way of transferring digital assets, we propose a system to execute Wills after the demise using blockchain. The proposed solution maps the assets using ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens and enables the owner of the Will to deploy a smart contract mentioning his wishes. The contract is executed based on the defined consensus mechanism, and the assets are transferred to the beneficiaries.

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Correspondence to Jainam Chirag Shah .

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© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Shah, J.C., Bhagwat, M., Patel, D., Conti, M. (2020). Crypto-Wills: Transferring Digital Assets by Maintaining Wills on the Blockchain. In: Bansal, J., Gupta, M., Sharma, H., Agarwal, B. (eds) Communication and Intelligent Systems. ICCIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 120. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3325-9_31

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