Estate Planning Model for Sustaining Economic Values of Digital Assets

The rapid growth of computer technology has led to the invention of digital assets containing financial values like cryptocurrency and e-wallets, consequently increasing individuals’ digital asset ownership. However, many people do not realise the importance of estate planning for their digital assets. In the case of sudden death, unavailable estate planning would cause the digital assets to vanish due to unavailable access to the digital assets’ credentials. Therefore, digital asset owners must have proper estate planning to allow smooth inheritance of their digital assets before an individual’s death, ensuring that their family is being taken care of. Besides, digital estate planning is also crucial to preventing cybercrimes such as identity theft and fraud. Hence, this paper bridges the gap by developing an estate planning software model to sustain digital assets containing economic values. The software model was developed by gathering the requirements for digital asset estate planning and visualising it in a prototype. Then, an evaluation was conducted on the prototype that visualised the proposed model. The results suggested that it is usable and facilitates digital asset estate planning. The significant contribution of this research is that the prototype enhances the security of one’s digital assets by giving access to a trusted person. It is also simple and cost-effective for digital asset owners by providing independent services for estate planning.