Digital asset inheritance has no death-trigger protocol

When someone dies, their crypto wallets, password managers, cloud storage, and online accounts become inaccessible because there is no standardized mechanism to transfer digital credentials upon death. The surviving family doesn't know which accounts exist, can't access them without passwords or private keys, and platforms like Google, Apple, and Coinbase each have different (and often months-long) legacy contact or deceased-user processes. So what? Families permanently lose access to cryptocurrency holdings, irreplaceable photos, important documents, and paid subscriptions they're still being billed for. So what? Billions of dollars in crypto alone are estimated lost forever because private keys died with their owners. So what? Grieving families face simultaneous financial loss and emotional distress, often discovering months later that assets existed but are unrecoverable. This persists because the tech industry built authentication around living users, treating death as an edge case. There is no cross-platform death-verification API, no standard for digital estate inventories, and no legal framework that compels platforms to honor a will's digital asset provisions uniformly across jurisdictions.