Disclaimer: This article may contain some outdated information.
To introduce our community to our new partner, we held an Ecosystem Talk on Wednesday, October 5th, 2022. We took a deep dive into Crypto Legacy’s product and the problem it aims to solve in Web3.
Imagine when investors pass away, their crypto assets locked away forever in wallets without any possible way for these assets to be transferred to a beneficiary… Crypto Legacy is here to help.
Crypto Legacy is a smart contract-based protocol and estate plan that protects your crypto and digital assets from loss, hackers, and other potential threats. It initiates the transfer of these assets to designated beneficiaries in the case of demise.
Asset Aggregation:
Keeps track of all your assets across every wallet, exchange, etc, and passes on wallet keys regardless of where assets are stored.
Maintain Full Control of your Assets:
You retain autonomy and can easily manage the beneficiaries of your assets.
Streamline Inheritance, Create a Crypto Will, and Probate:
Users can create a smart contract that takes note of all the assets and includes beneficiaries for these assets to be transferred to at the user’s demise. This adapts to global and local inheritance laws while keeping assets secure.
For Crypto Legacy to be fully functional, a decentralized compute and storage system is needed, and OORT (previously Computecoin) is able to provide just that.
OORT redefines the data infrastructure of Web3, eradicating the shortcomings of centralized and some decentralized storage by aggregating all major decentralized storage networks like Filecoin and Storj.
As such, Crypto Legacy will leverage OORT’s suite of decentralized cloud services to build its technology for data privacy, security, and durability.
💡 The transcript is almost entirely in its original form, but mildly edited for punctuation and readability only, and contains some of the intriguing issues discussed during the talks.
To listen to the Twitter Spaces, go 👉 here 👈
Thank you for joining us today. And a little bit of a brief introduction. This is Julia, the Community Manager here at OORT.
Joining me today will be Nitin from Crypto Legacy. He is really a blockchain and DeFi pioneer and a stock thought leader, as we shared in our community of his past works.
And joining us also is Tyler. Tyler is in our business development team and he is also a Web3 enthusiast.
Let’s give them a warm round of welcome and then, we’ll kick this thing off.
Thank you again. Really excited to have this conversation. I’ve been in the Space for quite some time and I’m happy to share that perspective. But also, I’ll love to continue the conversation in terms of what the audience thinks, post our live session here. So, thank you.
Thank you for joining us. Tyler, do you want to introduce yourself for a bit?
Yeah, sure. I just want to thank the team for getting Nitin’s time today and being able to share with us some of his thoughts on the industry, where it is currently, and where it’s going. I think that being a part of this conversation is really good. Just to encourage people to maybe ask more questions and start to question why we are doing the things we’re doing in web3. So, thanks for the introduction, Julia. I’m happy to be here. Nitin, thank you for being here and can’t wait to get this started.
Cool. First off, Nitin, do you want to tell our audience, those who are not that familiar with you, a brief self-introduction of your background and what you do at Crypto Legacy?
Absolutely. So, my name is Nitin. I’ve been displayed since 2011–2012. Early days. We all have our stories as to how we got smitten by Bitcoin.
I looked into technology first. As a technologist, I looked into the potentiality of true sense of coordinating around the world and relying upon consensus mechanisms and how that could build trust.
You know, as a human organization, from a truly trustless point of view. And so, that journey went on to found Blockchain Labs at IBM. I spent some time and then wanted to introduce digital asset concepts into this and founded Digital Asset Labs, which then brought in some of the elements of stablecoins, Central Bank, digital currencies, and tokenization of asset classes, not just existing asset classes, but also looking into tokenization of what we call non-bankable assets. And I’ll expand on that a little bit more in context of Crypto Legacy.
And now of course, I’m looking at this both in terms of how the industry has evolved in the shift from digitization to tokenization. And where we are heading with the contextual element of Web3.0 and eventually, as a foundational technology to support some of the elements of Metaverse and what that means in this case, and so, I’m so happy to share that perspective. And that’s in short, a quick roundup of the past 10+ years in the space.
But prior to that I was a technologist in distributed computing, looking into, again, the complexities of our existing environment in terms of performance, in terms of security. So, that actually led me to additional interest into the space from a technical perspective.
Thank you for sharing that, Nitin. And as many of you know that Crypto Legacy is one of our newly formed partnerships. Can you tell us a bit more about what Crypto Legacy is and what you guys do?
You know, me as “advisor and investor” in the entity, would take personal interest in taking what I’ve learned over time. And then again, it morphed into the Founder’s vision of “what happens to a digital legacy?”
So this legacy, meaning all your Facebook posts and all your social media posts, eventually becomes your legacy and it is up for the next generation to curate it, just like we would historically curate photographs and artifacts, to memorialize our ancestors and our fathers and our grandfathers. And we looked at this and said, “what will that look like in the digital world?” And as we were discussing this, I began to explore with the Founders and the amazing brilliant team, into saying that if that’s the case, can we not take this to an exponential level and saying what happens to digital assets?
So, it’s not just about digital content, but digital assets. And this is all your crypto assets, this is all tokenization of assets, and it’s not that simple because if you were to look at your existing assets, this is your brokerage accounts, your bank accounts, your fidelity accounts, and on the demise, this is easily distributed because there’s a system in place of probate and how the courts order are and how the assets are distributed, based on whether it’s available on probate structure and so on and so forth.
But in the case of digital assets, it’s a little bit more complex, because now you’re dealing with elements of what we call “custodial wallets”. These are claims to the assets that reside on blockchain. And that becomes a bit more complex because even if courts were to decide procedurally and the ability for us to take these assets and distribute these assets and disseminate the assets is not that simple. And so, we then look into the technical possibilities.
But also, in many cases, we have to be in sync with what the industry is doing and leveraging the same technology to counter the technology to be able to facilitate mechanism that you could provide a legacy and transfer of generational wealth, not just the traditional wealth that you have accumulated over time and heirloom, but also the digital assets that we are now beginning to accumulate as the industry has been sort of chugging along for past 14 years. So that’s one data point.
Second data point I’d like to mention is that I discern between the digital content and digital assets. But if you will look into some of the thematic elements of Web3.0, which is again a creator-led content, and semantic web, which is again looking into treating data as an asset and then the content itself becomes an asset class, per se. And that is again, the theme of Web3.0. It is figuring out what can be done in terms of not just passing data as additional legacy, but the ability for us to monetize this for generations to come. And I think that’s the very forward thinking idea that we’re looking at. It’s not just confined to your existing Will and probate, it expands to all the asset classes that are going to emerge in future.
I’ll take a pause to see if that makes sense.
Yeah, thank you for that. The Semantic Web of treating data as an asset is technically a forward-thinking way of putting it, and the name “Crypto Legacy” is self explanatory of what you guys do.
But for those of our audience that aren’t super familiar with the solution and the exact product, can you introduce a bit more about the specific product of Crypto Legacy and what you’re offering to the community members?
A few things in this one. One is, if you look at how we preserve our crypto assets, and eventually digital assets. And I do differentiate between the two because Crypto Assets, it’s a byproduct of crypto economic systems; this is a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the various other crypto protocols that generate these assets based on crypto economic systems, and Digital Assets — another emerging class where we are tokenizing existing asset classes to provide the same level of efficiency and processing power of blockchain as a transaction system.
And so, the way we claim the ownership, that asset always lives on chain, is to claim that you safeguard. This is what we look into, what people have heard about key management, and what people have heard about keeping private keys safe, that becomes a part of your wallet. Your wallet becomes an application that gives you access to your assets and you use the keys to claim your asset, which always resides in a blockchain as a transaction system.
And so, today you have various elements whether you’re looking at “Non-custodial Wallet”, which is you keep everything safe, which means you’re technically savvy and you have the right apparatus and right technology to keep all your key phrases safe, that you don’t lose your asset because once you lose the key, which is the claim to your asset, then it is practically impossible for you to claim your assets until you recover that key. So, there’s a savviness involved in that, which is very minimal today, and at a scale at which managing a massive portfolio of assets becomes quite complicated, even for savvy individuals.
And then you have something called a “Custodial Wallet”, which is basically somebody else, just like our financial entities and financial institutions, keeping our assets and our money safe. You have entities like exchanges, who keep your assets safe on your behalf and of course, there’s a business model behind it. And those are custodial wallets.
And the vision was, that removing complexity of either of the case, no matter how you keep your assets or claim to the assets safe, whether it’s a custodial or noncustodial wallet, we would want to provide an avenue that on your device which is on you know at posthumous made after the death of an individual, if there is a mechanism that you have already decided, whether it’s a part of your Will process or it’s part of probate process that the court has to govern on, there is a mechanism that we have devised which allows to simplify the entire process to say that regardless of how you keep your assets or claim to the assets safe, we want to provide a platform that provides a mechanism to ensure that there’s not one single entity that has control of the asset, because we have seen that over and over again that if one single entity has control of your assets in terms of keeping your keys safe, but it could result in permanent loss, whether it’s due to carelessness of the platform, or simple fraudulent activity that somebody may be involved in.
So, we try to address those elements of completely eliminating fraud, and having a system in place that you can provide a vehicle for transfer of these digital assets in confines of the existing way of how we manage their keys and how do we keep the claims on the assets safe, in a mechanism that is irrelevant of how you keep it safe but giving you a choice of platform, giving you a choice architecture, in transferring of that wealth to your designated nominees, exactly how we would do that for traditional assets.
That’s in a nutshell what we’re trying to do. Of course, there’s lots of technology behind it. And we’re trying to surface and hide that complexity and make it simple, where we can hold the parties accountable. But we also want to ensure that we have a platform that addresses things like privacy, preservation, and non-repudiation, which ensures that the assets move as per the wishes of the client.
I’ll pause here to see if that adds some clarity to the product.
Thank you, Nitin, for this valuable introduction of the Crypto Legacy product. And to put simply, as a part of our partnership, our community members will be able to enjoy the Crypto Legacy product, either at a discounted rate or for a period of time complimentary. And if any of you have digital assets, which I believe you all do, this is something that could potentially be very helpful for you.
So, in terms of Crypto Legacy’s product and our community members, like kind of the overlapping interest. Can you clarify further for us? Only targeting users that are interested in setting up a crypto will. And could you dictate the user experience journey also? Like say the younger generation that are concerned about what happens after they’re gone? How exactly does your product help safeguard our digital assets?
That’s a good question. I won’t use the word that gone. I think it’s just more of a transition that happens. I think we are also looking into the ability for the technology itself to be utilized for other transitional elements. So it’s not just about posthumous transfer of assets. We’re looking at this from a perspective of transitioning assets in the event — life events. Like you’re stuck somewhere and you want to make sure that you have things like power of attorney, things that we do now for people to be able to provide a delegate for them to handle the assets. And so the user experience is quite simple. Again, I would not entirely squarely focus on crypto assets per se. I will look at this in terms of digital legacy, and having a legacy transition plan to simply sign up a contract.
You could start as simple as getting on to clocker.com, for example, and signing up with the platform and again, they’re related because it’s an onboarding mechanism and then eventually, you can start checkboxing the type of asset that you want to onboard. And it’s of really no cost, which means that the whole idea is there to be able to provide familiarity with the platform and as your needs grow, it’s then when you begin to look into planning for how you pay for those services. And the experience is fairly straightforward. I mean, if you have purely digital content like Facebook and Twitter, then it’s an onboarding mechanism. We onboard you, we collect the right data, we collect the right information, we have the right consent, because there are legalities involved and there is privacy preservation involved and we take privacy very seriously, especially in this day and age, from a perspective of “how do we protect the privacy?” and also “how do we protect the data that our clients are entrusting us with?”
The second thing we look at, in this case, is as your needs grow, then we look into saying that if you have, let’s say, you acquire your first digital asset, and this could be again be a transitional journey for a middle-aged professional who may begin to start collecting this and you have a family and if you’re building a will, then this becomes an inclusive part of the will that you’re not having to separately worry about; “Okay, what do I do with this asset class?” It becomes a part of your overall planning process. So, we don’t want this to be something outstanding, something that is something we need to take care of. It should be an inclusive process to every part of your life event that you plan with — if that makes sense. Which means that if you’re a teenager or if you’re still growing or you’re 21, you don’t really have the need for a legacy planning, which we won’t want to force fit that thought process. But in many cases, unlike traditional assets, that has certain implications, that in the event of a demise, or in the event of a life event, then that assets can be claimed by your family members or can be moved. That is not quite the case for digital assets. And that understanding is important for many younger listeners and audiences and folks who are embarking on this. That needs to be understood and if the wealth becomes quite sizable, then regardless of your age and life situations, that may not be a bad thing to start looking into, only because you don’t want that wealth to be stuck and never be utilized in future.
You mentioned previously that Crypto Legacy’s products streamline inheritance and I read that it adapts to global and local inheritance laws while keeping assets secure. How is this being realized currently considering the numerous inheritance laws out there from all over the world?
Yeah. So right now, we are still focusing purely on US markets at the moment because we live here and we understand, we are in touch with our internal ecosystems and also our advisors, like myself, who have the legal expertise. And there’s an understanding there are some frameworks for digital content that lays out what’s needed to be done. So, right now the focus is on the United States, and having traveled the world, you’re absolutely right, that the probate laws and the restrictions are different and you need to have the level of scale that lets you do that.
We certainly have the technology, but technology needs to be wrapped with the processes that respect the laws and adhere to those laws and regulations regarding probate and will and estate planning in respective countries. So right now, the question is, can we address the larger markets? The markets that actually have a much more defined process?
And as you know, in the United States, I recall, as a part of the normal financial planning process, estate planning is central to it. So, anybody who’s in a mid-career path and who is looking into… who even has a 401K At some point, has thought about wills, which is not the case in some of the emerging economies. And so, we do need to be able to bite what we can chew. And at some point, when we reach a certain scale, then it becomes easier to morph, only because we have experience, we have done some of these other elements, that makes things a bit easier.
So that’s one data point, if that makes sense.
What’s interesting about OORT is this, it redefines infrastructure needed for Web3.0, right? This is totally for decentralization, and not just for us, but any project that aspires to grow into the space, we need to leverage decentralized compute, decentralized storage, and overall thematic sense of leveraging fueling the industry. Because if you’re building on a decentralized system and you’re still using centralized storage like, let’s say, Google Compute, or Google Cloud Engine, or Amazon, or Microsoft, for example, then just like your mobile apps that went out of business and forgot to pay the bills and didn’t pay the bills, you begin to lose your data and if you’re truly relying upon an end-to-end mechanism, then you do need something like a decentralized storage, and you begin to see this massively growing because you’re talking about content here. We’re talking about, again, Web3.0 is not just about any content, it’s about semantic web; when we begin to value these things, they need to be kept in a way where it’s resilient, it’s cost effective, and it should live forever, which is the whole point of these things. So, it’s not just about transacting the tokenization of data, but it’s also ensuring that the data itself, which is the real value, is kept in a fashion which is durable, resilient, and so on, so forth.
So, OORT gives us that platform for us to develop our technology and leverage the underlying compute that is resilient and that is durable, and that’s the starting point.
The trio continued to cover the possible partnerships in the future with financial institutions and the technologies used in the Crypto Legacy product. They also discussed salient controversies in Web3.0 and Nitin enlightened the community on how invariably families could transition into a Web3 Wealth Management System and what participating in Web3 should be like.
Access the full conversation 👉 here 👈