A verifiable, multi-jurisdictional succession instrument. Verified at signing. Survivable across institutional failure. Privacy by default.
Probate-ready packets, e-will qualified custody, executor toolkits, capacity attestation. The succession instrument estate planning lawyers attach to make wills effectively uncontestable.
A verifiable, multi-jurisdictional succession instrument. Larger than a will, because it is verified at signing — capacity and intent recorded in the moment — asset-comprehensive across banks, property, crypto including Bitcoin, digital assets and intellectual property, survivable across institutional failure through multi-custodian holding and an optional public registry, and privacy-architected so existence and validity can be confirmed without ever revealing contents.
A verifiable, multi-jurisdictional succession instrument.
A will is an eighteenth-century instrument doing twenty-first-century work. Three structural failure modes recur, decade after decade, in every jurisdiction.
Wills fight over capacity and interpretation, not authenticity. Was the testator competent at the moment of signing? Did the words mean what one side claims they mean? These are the disputes that drag through court for years, and a will does almost nothing to settle them in advance.
Months to years in court. Filing fees, executor fees, attorney fees, contested-claim fees. Hold an asset in two countries and you fight two probate systems with two sets of lawyers under two bodies of law. Estates of moderate complexity routinely lose ten to forty percent to friction alone.
Bitcoin and other crypto assets die with the holder unless the keys are recoverable. No probate court can compel a private key. Without a custody plan made before death, the wealth simply vanishes — a problem already measured in the millions of bitcoin permanently lost.
Each layer attaches to a different structural failure of the traditional will. Together they form a single, verifiable, jurisdiction-agnostic succession instrument.
Bio-ID, two-witness attestation, medical capacity sign-off, recorded capacity video. The contested question — was the testator competent at the moment of signing? — is resolved on the record, by named witnesses, by a clinician, by visible recorded behavior, in the moment, not relitigated years later when the testator is gone and only the document remains.
bio-IDtwo-witnessmedical sign-offcapacity video
Formal beneficiary declarations alongside a recorded narrative of the reasoning. Not just who inherits what, but why — in the testator's own voice. Recorded intent narrows interpretation disputes before they begin and gives heirs and courts a primary source for the choices the testator made.
declarationsrecorded narrativenamed beneficiariesconditions
A single graph of every asset: bank accounts, real property, crypto held through key-custody arrangements, digital assets, intellectual property and royalty streams. For each: where it lives, who can access it, what activates the access, and where the recovery path runs if the primary path fails.
bankspropertycrypto custodydigital assetsintellectual property
Multiple custodians hold separate pieces — no single custodian holds the whole instrument. Multi-source death verification (death certificate plus secondary signal plus cooling-off window) ensures the protocol triggers only on verified death. Versioning ensures the latest signed protocol always governs. No single point of failure, institutional or human.
multi-custodianmulti-source verificationcooling-off windowversioning
Three verifiable layers. Each can be confirmed independently. The boundary between what is public, what is verifiable, and what is private is engineered, not informal.
An PLENA Inheritance Protocol can be registered to a specific moment in time, allowing any party to confirm that the holder created and signed one. The registry shows existence and date. It does not show the document. The holder opts in to registry-level visibility; opting out is the default for holders who want existence itself kept private.
Lawyers, executors, banks, and institutions can verify that the PLENA Inheritance Protocol presented to them is the latest signed version, was signed under the capacity attestation procedure, and has not been revoked — using zero-knowledge verification. They confirm validity without seeing contents.
Contents disclose only under four conditions: by the holder directly, by time-locked release on verified death, by holder-defined conditions (a specified date, a specified life event, a unanimous beneficiary signal), or by court order. There is no other path to disclosure. There is no PLENA backdoor. There is no custodian who holds the contents in cleartext.
Privacy by default. Existence and validity verifiable. Contents disclosed only by the holder, by triggered conditions the holder set, or by court order.
The PLENA Inheritance Protocol does not replace the Bitcoin protocol. It operates above it.
The PLENA Inheritance Protocol operates above Bitcoin the way HTTP operates above TCP — leaving the underlying protocol untouched, adding a layer of human and institutional meaning the underlying protocol was never designed to carry.
Vaults requiring multiple signers to release funds, with signers chosen for survivability — geographic diversity, institutional diversity, family-plus-professional combinations. A single death does not strand the Vault; a single compromise does not drain it.
Seed phrases mathematically split into shares distributed across custodians, where any threshold (three of five, two of three) reconstructs the key. No single custodian holds the seed. No single custodian can drain the Vault. No single failure loses the wealth.
Release triggered by verified death certificate, with cooling-off windows to reject forged signals. Custody automatically rotates from holder to designated heirs without requiring a probate court to compel a private key — because no probate court can.
The same approach extends to Ethereum, stablecoins, NFTs, and other on-chain assets. Custody is method-neutral; the PLENA Inheritance Protocol orchestrates whichever custody primitive the asset requires.
The PLENA Inheritance Protocol is the first credible bridge between traditional probate and crypto custody.
For the full Bitcoin custody mechanics, see PLENA Bitcoin Inheritance Custody.
The protocol adapts to the institutional reality of each jurisdiction. The architecture is the same; the surfacing differs.
Where probate courts work, where e-wills are recognized, where licensed custodians are accountable, the protocol surfaces as conventional estate planning — only with capacity and crypto questions resolved at signing instead of in litigation.
Where probate is unreliable, where institutional continuity is not guaranteed, where formal records can be lost or contested, the protocol surfaces as a publicly verifiable instrument with community-anchored claim paths.
The legal door is opening, the asset class is exploding, and the generational moment is here. Four signals tell us the timing is right.
New York signed its Electronic Wills Act on December 12, 2025, becoming the 16th US state plus DC. The Uniform Electronic Wills Act has been adopted in some form in seven states (Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Washington). Six more (Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Nevada) have non-uniform e-will statutes. Five years ago this regulatory category did not exist. Today, qualified electronic wills custodianship is a recognized statutory role.
The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) has been adopted in some form in 47 states by 2026, giving executors statutory access to digital accounts held by institutional custodians. The legal substrate for digital inheritance is in place. What is missing is the verified asset graph that lets executors find what to claim.
Credible analyses estimate that between 17% and 23% of all Bitcoin in circulation is permanently inaccessible — the great majority from holders who died without recoverable keys. The first generation of significant crypto holders is now aging into the inheritance window. Without a bridge between cryptographic custody and traditional probate, the losses accelerate.
The Cerulli Associates projection of $84 trillion in US generational wealth transfer through 2045 represents the largest intergenerational wealth movement in human history. It includes property, businesses, retirement accounts, and a new asset class (crypto) that traditional estate planning was not designed to handle.
The infrastructure for verified, multi-jurisdictional, crypto-aware succession does not yet exist. The legal, economic, and demographic conditions for it are converging now.
A standalone evidence kit — useful even without the full PLENA Inheritance Protocol.
The PLENA Capacity Attestation Packet is the standalone evidence kit that estate planning lawyers can attach to traditional wills to make them effectively uncontestable. Bio-ID, two-witness sign-off, medical capacity attestation, recorded capacity narrative — packaged for filing alongside any will, in any jurisdiction. The packet is the first layer of the PLENA Inheritance Protocol available independently, designed for the lawyer who wants a uncontestable will today without migrating the client to a full protocol.
Read more about the PLENA Capacity Attestation Packet →
The PLENA Capacity Attestation Packet sister page is forthcoming.
The full technical and legal architecture, drafted for estate planning bar association review.
The complete protocol specification: identity and capacity attestation procedure, intent-recording standard, asset-graph schema, multi-custodian and multi-source-death-verification mechanics, zero-knowledge validity proof, and the privacy boundary engineering. Drafted for review by estate planning bar associations, multilateral trust authorities, and crypto custody providers.
Front-end signup preview. A real release would route through PlenaProof Vault identity and the standard PLENA notification system. Email addresses submitted here are stored locally in your browser only until the backend signup endpoint is live.
For estate planning lawyers, family offices, NGOs, multilateral trust authorities, and individuals architecting a serious succession plan.