If you own cryptocurrency, one fact decides almost everything about what your family goes through when you die: most crypto platforms do not let you name a beneficiary. Coinbase is one of them. Everything below follows from that.
Can You Name a Beneficiary on a Coinbase Account?
No. Coinbase says so in its own help center: “Coinbase doesn’t currently support naming a beneficiary for individual accounts.”
There is no payable-on-death designation, no transfer-on-death registration, and no beneficiary field buried in your account settings. That makes a Coinbase account very different from a bank account, a life insurance policy or an IRA, all of which pass straight to the person you named without any court involvement.
Because there is nobody named, your Coinbase account is part of your probate estate. Your family cannot simply log in and take it. They have to go to the Probate Court first.
Can You Put a Coinbase Account in a Trust?
Not an ordinary Coinbase.com account, and this is where a great deal of online advice is simply wrong. Coinbase’s help center states that “we don’t support joint Coinbase accounts or accounts in the name of trusts or similar entities on Coinbase.com.” Accounts in the name of a trust are supported only through Coinbase Prime, their business and institutional platform.
So if the plan was to retitle a Coinbase account into your revocable trust the way you would retitle a bank account or a brokerage account, that door is closed at Coinbase. Other exchanges and self-custody arrangements have different rules, and some of them do allow trust ownership. That is exactly why crypto has to be looked at platform by platform rather than assumed.
And be careful of the reverse mistake. Listing “cryptocurrency” on a schedule attached to your trust does not change the ownership of any actual account. A schedule records an intention; the provider’s own account rules decide what the account is. The registration, the custody method and the platform’s terms all have to be checked before anyone assumes the trust owns anything.
What Your Family Actually Has to Do to Claim a Coinbase Account
Coinbase handles this through what it calls Executor Services. Your personal representative signs into or creates a Coinbase account, opens the Executor Services form, and submits:
- An official death certificate
- Probate documents — Letters Testamentary, Letters of Administration, an Affidavit for Collection, or a Small Estate Affidavit
- Valid government-issued photo identification for the person named in those probate documents
- A signed letter directing where the assets should be transferred
Read that list again. Every route on it runs through the Probate Court. There is no version of this where your family phones customer service and skips probate. If you want to know what that process looks like, we wrote it up here: What is probate in Massachusetts and when is it required?
Why This Is Worse in Massachusetts Than in Most States
Most states have adopted a version of the Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives an executor a legal path to a deceased person’s online accounts when the documents are silent. Massachusetts has not. A bill to adopt it is pending in the current legislative session, and its sponsor summary notes that Massachusetts is one of only four United States jurisdictions still without such a law.
The practical effect is that in Massachusetts, the language in your own documents is doing work that a statute does elsewhere. If your will and your power of attorney do not specifically grant access to digital assets, there may be nothing to fall back on.
Does Your Will Actually Cover Your Crypto?
If your will pre-dates crypto, or is more than two or three years old, it very likely does not. A will can direct who receives a crypto account, but the language has to be specific enough that the provider will honor it. A will that says “all my assets go to my children” is not specific enough, and the provider can refuse your personal representative access.
Two things to be clear about. First, a will is a safeguard, not a plan — assets that pass under a will go through probate, which means time, cost and a public court file. Second, having the right digital asset language reviewed is not optional here, for the reason in the section above. If you are not sure what your documents say, have them read by an estate planning attorney.
Exchange Account or Self-Custody Wallet? The Answer Changes
It matters a great deal whether you hold crypto through an exchange account or in a self-custody wallet. With an exchange, a company maintains the account and has a procedure for responding to a properly authorized estate representative. With self-custody, access depends on private keys, a recovery phrase, passkeys or some other recovery arrangement — and Coinbase says plainly that with those wallets “neither CB Lux nor any other Coinbase entity has access to, or control over, the assets you manage”, and that loss or compromise “generally means irretrievable loss.” A court appointment can establish who has legal authority without supplying the technical means to move anything.
If you die without ever having told anyone where the wallet and keys are, a self-custody holding can simply be lost. There is no statement that arrives in the post and no institution holding it on your behalf to surface it later. This is the one part of crypto planning that no lawyer can fix after the fact, and it is why we ask clients to record where things are held, separately from the documents themselves.
Never Put Your Recovery Phrase in Your Will
This one catches people out, and it is worth stating bluntly. Recovery phrases and private keys must never be written into your will. A will filed in probate generally becomes part of a public court record. Anything written in it can be read by anyone who asks for the file. Sensitive access information belongs in a separate, carefully protected arrangement that the right person can reach when it is legitimately needed.
What does belong somewhere findable is an inventory: which providers you use, what kinds of wallets you hold, and where the authorized person should look for the secure access instructions. It needs maintaining as accounts and devices change. And note that the two halves of this are different problems — deciding who is legally entitled to the crypto, and making sure an authorized person can actually locate and administer it. A will leaving everything to your children will not help them find a wallet they do not know exists. Handing someone your credentials does not make them the legal owner or authorize them to distribute anything.
What Is Cryptocurrency, and How Is It Taxed?
Cryptocurrency, virtual currency and digital currency all describe money or assets that are held and exchanged over the internet. Bitcoin is the best known; there are thousands of others, along with digital assets called NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens.” Transactions are recorded on an electronic ledger known as a blockchain, which makes the record extremely difficult to alter.
For tax purposes the key point is that the IRS treats digital assets as property, not as currency. So the same capital gains principles that apply when you sell a house apply when you dispose of crypto: held twelve months or less, short-term rates; held more than twelve months, long-term rates. Selling crypto for cash, or swapping one digital currency for another, can both be taxable events. Simply buying more, or moving your own holdings between platforms, is not. Crypto received as compensation is taxed as income at its fair market value.
One correction worth making, because it circulates widely: you cannot roll one cryptocurrency into another as a 1031 like-kind exchange. Since the start of 2018, section 1031 applies only to real property, and the IRS has concluded that crypto-for-crypto swaps did not qualify even before that change.
Can You Hold Crypto in a Retirement Account?
In an IRA, yes, through providers that offer it. For 401(k) plans the picture has changed, and older articles on this get it wrong. In 2022 the Department of Labor told plan fiduciaries to exercise “extreme care” before offering crypto. It rescinded that guidance on May 28, 2025 and took a formally neutral position, saying investment decisions belong to fiduciaries rather than to federal regulators. In March 2026 the Department went further and proposed a rule to open 401(k) plans to alternative investments more broadly.
So whether crypto is available inside your 401(k) is now a question for your employer and your plan fiduciary, not a federal prohibition. That does not make it a good idea or a bad one for you — that is an investment question, and we are not investment advisors.
How We Handle Digital Assets in Your Estate Plan
We add digital asset language to the core documents in every plan we draft — the four documents we call the Foundational 4 — so that your personal representative, your trustee and your agent under a power of attorney all have express authority to deal with online accounts. Clients who hold crypto tell us where and how it is held, and we build the plan around what that particular platform actually permits, which as you have seen is not the same from one to the next.
If you hold crypto and your documents have not been looked at since you bought it, that is worth half an hour of somebody’s attention.
Book a free 15-minute consult call with our Lead Intake Coordinator, Nicole Ott, or give us a call at 978-657-7437. There is no charge and no pressure — the goal is simply to work out what your family actually needs to do next.
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