Probate Worked on Everything Else
Maureen had done everything right, and she had the paperwork to prove it.
She had the grant of probate. She had a stack of death certificates. She had a lawyer who’d walked her through the whole process and a binder with tabs down the side. On the kitchen table in front of her sat a small black device about the size of a car key fob, which her father had kept in the back of a dresser drawer and had once described, with some pride, as “where the Bitcoin lives.”
Maureen couldn’t open it. Her lawyer couldn’t open it. The court that issued the grant couldn’t open it either.
Probate got her the house, the bank account, and the car in the garage. It did nothing at all for the thing on the kitchen table.
Two Kinds of Crypto, Only One Reachable
If your money is on an exchange, somebody else is holding it for you. You have an account, a password, and a balance on a screen, but the actual coins sit on a company’s system. That’s what “custodial” means. The company has an address, a compliance department, and a business that depends on staying on the right side of the law.
That company can be made to deal with your executor. This spring, a judge of Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench said so in a written decision after Apple refused to give an estate’s administrators access to a deceased man’s accounts, even though they were holding a court grant that specifically covered his digital assets. The judge wrote that no further order was required, and that the court isn’t in the business of issuing duplicate orders to reassure risk-averse technology companies that won’t learn the laws of the places they do business. He invited executors to hand his written reasons to the next company that tries it.
That’s a useful thing for an executor to be carrying. A judge could order Apple to hand those accounts over because Apple is a company with a Canadian address and something to lose.
Self-custody is built to work the other way. Nobody holds the asset. It sits on a public ledger, and the only thing that moves it is a private key. That key lives on a hardware wallet, or in a phone app, or on twenty-four words written on a card in a fireproof box. Whoever has the key controls the coins. Nobody else does. Not the company that sold the device, not the exchange the coins came from, and not a judge.
So when Maureen held a grant of probate up to that device, there was nothing on the other end of it. No company to serve. No account to reset. No support line to escalate to. Just a sealed box and a number that died with her father.
Canadian law didn’t overlook this. The people who drafted our model legislation saw it coming and left it alone deliberately. When the Uniform Law Conference of Canada wrote its model legislation on fiduciary access to digital assets, cryptocurrency, NFTs and other decentralized assets with no identifiable custodian were left out of the regime entirely, because there’s nobody who can be compelled to provide access.
The rest of the country doesn’t fix this either
That ruling came out of Alberta, so it doesn’t bind a court in Halifax or Winnipeg. The situation it describes turns up in every province and territory.
Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Yukon have adopted some version of the Uniform Act. The Alberta Law Reform Institute recommended in 2024 that Alberta pass one too. Most of the country still runs on general estate legislation and on whatever the executor can talk a company into.
In Quebec, a liquidator’s authority comes from the Civil Code rather than a grant of probate, and a notarial will isn’t probated at all. In the territories, the usual obstacle is distance and delay rather than the law itself.
None of that reaches a hardware wallet. Every one of these systems works by telling a custodian what to do. Change the province, change the statute, change the legal tradition entirely, and the wallet in the drawer still doesn’t open.
Maureen knew what was in the wallet. She just couldn’t touch it.
Blockchain balances are public. Every address and every transaction sits on a ledger anyone can read, and there are free websites that will show you the running total. What stays private is the key that moves the coins. Watching the money and spending it are two separate abilities, and her father had left her only one of them.
The hard part is finding the address. It usually comes off the paper trail. An exchange’s withdrawal records show where coins went when the owner moved them off the platform. A prior year’s tax return might name the holdings. Some people run software on a laptop that displays a balance without ever holding the key. Turn one of those up and you can watch the balance to the penny while doing nothing at all about it. Turn none of them up and you’re holding a sealed device with no idea whether it’s worth two hundred dollars or two hundred thousand, and the estate can’t even guess at the number.
An unreachable wallet still generates a tax bill. Dying triggers a deemed disposition of capital property at fair market value, and the Canada Revenue Agency treats cryptocurrency as property, so the gain gets reported whether or not anybody can reach the coins. Half of that gain becomes taxable income on the final return. The estate pays that tax out of the assets it can actually reach.
THE TAX BILL OUTLIVED THE ASSET
Amir’s mother held roughly $180,000 in crypto across two places. Some of it sat in an account at a Canadian exchange. About $140,000 of it she’d moved into a self-custody wallet during a period when she’d stopped trusting exchanges. The exchange account took four months and a lot of email, but it settled. But the wallet never opened. Amir found the device in her filing cabinet. He never found the recovery phrase. The exchange’s withdrawal records did show him where his mother had sent the coins, so at least the number wasn’t a mystery.
The amount held in the wallet still counted. Her cost base on those coins was around $25,000, so the deemed disposition threw off a gain of roughly $115,000, and half of that landed on her final return as taxable income. Amir paid the bill out of the cash side of the estate, which came straight out of what he and his sister were meant to split. His mother’s crypto is still sitting on a public ledger where anyone can look up the balance and no one can access it.
What has to happen while you’re alive
Maureen’s father and Amir’s mother left the same gap behind them. Everything that could have opened either wallet had to be written down while they were still alive. Nobody can sort this out afterward.
This is exactly what In Plain Sight™ is built for. It takes you through recording where your accounts actually live, what your executor needs in order to reach each one, and where those instructions are kept, so nothing important ends up sealed inside a device only you can open. If you hold crypto, or you’re the person somebody once asked to “remember these words just in case,” it gets that vague arrangement written down somewhere your executor can use it.
You’ll find it with the rest of the toolkit at nexsteps.ca/tools.
A few things worth doing no matter what:
Write down what exists, not how to get in. In most of the country a will becomes a public document once it’s probated, so a recovery phrase has no business being in it. An inventory of what you hold does.
Keep the list and the keys apart. Your executor needs to know a wallet exists. Where the seed phrase lives is a second piece of information, protected differently, and it needs a named person and a real location rather than a hint.
Leave the paper trail alone. Exchange records and old statements are how a family finds the wallet address and puts a value on it. Don’t shred them, and don’t close the exchange account you emptied years ago.
Use the legacy tools you already have. Apple’s Legacy Contact and Google’s Inactive Account Manager both let you name someone in advance. Each takes about five minutes, and between them they sidestep the whole fight that judge was writing about.
Tell your executor the wallet is there. Not the code. Just that it exists. An executor who doesn’t know to look won’t look.
Ask for express authority over digital assets when your will is drafted, so the grant your executor eventually holds says so explicitly.
One more thing
The Alberta case is worth noticing because there was nothing unusual about it. A family lost someone. They went to court. They got the order. Then they spent months getting nowhere with a company’s compliance department, until a judge finally wrote out his reasons so the next family wouldn’t be starting over.
Nothing like that is coming for the wallet on the kitchen table. No company to embarrass, no order to serve, no judge who can do anything about it. The executor gets whatever the owner wrote down while there was still time to write it.
Your executor can win in court and still lose the coins. Nobody can fix that for them once you’re gone. It gets decided at your own kitchen table, this week.
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Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.
