Article: Post-Mortem Control of Digital Assets: Beyond Succession: Legal Authority, Custody, Access, and Identity in Cross-Border Digital Markets

Digital assets have become constitutive elements of private wealth. Crypto-assets, tokenised instruments, platform-mediated holdings, and digitally embedded identity are routinely acquired and transmitted across jurisdictions, forming part of modern estates. Yet the frameworks governing their post-mortem administration remain structurally inadequate.

This article argues that digital inheritance scholarship has concentrated too heavily on transmissibility, while the harder problem lies elsewhere: who holds legally recognised authority over digital assets once succession has occurred; who controls the intimate digital traces of a life; and which law governs each question when assets, custodians, and successors are distributed across jurisdictions. These are distinct legal questions. Conflating them explains most of the frictions that plague digital succession.

Drawing on Regulation (EU) 650/2012, MiCA, the UNIDROIT Principles (2023), and the ELI Project on Succession of Digital Assets, and on comparative case law—BGH III ZR 183/17, Ajemian v. Yahoo! and Tulip Trading—the article develops post-mortem control as an autonomous legal category, integrates post-mortem privacy theory, and examines the tertium quid in English property law. It proposes four operational principles and a new instrument, the Post-Mortem Control Certificate (PMCC), designed for cross-border recognition and able to close the gap between succession entitlement and effective authority.