What the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 actually does
The Act removes a legal obstacle. It does not, by itself, create a new rulebook for crypto. Until recently, English law recognised only two categories of personal property: a thing in possession (something physical you can hold) and a thing in action (a right you can enforce by legal action, like a debt or a share). Crypto-tokens and NFTs fit neither comfortably — they are not physical, and they are not a straightforward legal claim against anyone. English courts had already worked around that gap well before this Act — in AA v Persons Unknown [2019] EWHC 3556 (Comm), the High Court granted a proprietary injunction treating stolen Bitcoin as property, relying on the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce's 2019 legal statement rather than any statute. The gap this Act addresses was residual doubt at the level of statute, not a working legal vacuum the courts were failing to fill.
s.1 PDAA 2025 — the Act's entire substantive text — reads: “A thing (including a thing that is digital or electronic in nature) is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither— (a) a thing in possession, nor (b) a thing in action.” It received Royal Assent on 2 December 2025 and, under s.2 PDAA 2025, came into force the same day.
A clarifying Act, not a comprehensive digital-assets code.
The phrase “third category” of property, widely used to describe what this Act enables, comes from the Law Commission's June 2023 report, not from the Act's own wording — the Act itself is negatively worded: it says what does not prevent something being property, rather than declaring a new category outright. The Law Commission has said plainly that the Act deliberately leaves the boundaries — which digital things qualify, how disputes over them are resolved — to be developed by the courts, case by case.
Separate Law Commission work on collateral arrangements for crypto-tokens is ongoing and unresolved, and is not covered by this Act.
One extent point worth getting right: the Act applies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland only. s.2 PDAA 2025 extends it to those three jurisdictions and no further — Scotland is not covered by this statute. Nothing on this page should be read across to a Scottish estate without separate advice.
What this means in practice: the law now backs up what most people already assumed — that a crypto-token you hold is genuinely yours, capable of being owned, inherited and fought over like any other property. §II covers how HMRC already taxes that property. §III covers the part the Act does nothing to fix.
How cryptocurrency is taxed when someone dies
HMRC treats cryptoassets as property for Inheritance Tax, in exactly the way you'd expect. HMRC's Cryptoassets Manual (CRYPTO25000) states plainly that cryptoassets are “treated as assets of a person's estate in much the same way as other assets, such as bank accounts, property, shares, and investments”, and that the date-of-death value should be provided on the IHT return. The manual itself doesn't cite a valuation section — the general rule it's applying is s.160 IHTA 1984, which values any asset in a death estate at the price it might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold in the open market at that time. For a death estate, that time is the date of death.
Valued at date of death
No loss-on-sale relief
Situs can matter for non-doms
Known but inaccessible crypto still has to be declared.
HMRC's guidance is explicit: where cryptoassets are identified but believed inaccessible, personal representatives should still disclose them, in the additional information box of the IHT400, explaining why they are inaccessible and giving an estimated value. The estate is not excused from declaring an asset simply because no one can currently reach it — which is exactly why §III matters: the law taxes it whether or not the family can actually get to it.
If you're working through the wider inheritance tax position for an estate that includes crypto, the inheritance tax calculator takes the full estate — crypto included — through the current thresholds and reliefs.
The one risk a bank account doesn't have
Legal recognition and correct taxation solve nothing about access. This is the single most useful, most honest thing this page can say: a self-custody crypto holding can be legally owned property, correctly declared, and correctly taxed — and permanently, cryptographically lost to the family, all at the same time. The 2025 Act does nothing to change that, because it was never trying to.
No bank, no OPG-equivalent authority, no forgotten-assets scheme.
There is no bank-style indemnity process for a self-custody wallet. There is no equivalent of the Court of Protection or the Office of the Public Guardian that can compel access on anyone's behalf.
And the UK's Dormant Assets Scheme — which holds unclaimed balances from old bank, building society, insurance, pension and certain investment or securities holdings — does not cover self-custodied cryptocurrency; it was built for regulated financial-services sectors, and crypto self-custody sits outside every one of them. None of the three routes that exist for a forgotten bank account exist here.
The gap the 2025 Act does not close is a practical one, not a legal one: whoever holds a self-custody wallet is, in effect, the only institution that can ever unlock it. §V is what to do about that while that is still possible.
What Coinbase, Kraken and Binance publish about a death in the family
Exchange-held crypto behaves far more like a conventional account — but there's still no shortcut. If the crypto sits on an exchange rather than in a self-custody wallet, the exchange can verify the account and release the balance to an executor. But none of the three exchanges below offers a beneficiary or transfer-on-death nomination for an ordinary UK retail account — each runs its own bespoke, documentation-heavy claims process, worked through only after the death.
Coinbase
Kraken
Binance
The lesson is the same as for self-custody, just less severe: an executor can only start any of these three processes if they know the account exists in the first place. Simply recording which exchange holds this — without ever writing down a password — removes most of the friction.
What to actually do about it
The fix is not a legal instrument. It's a findable record, kept current. A will can leave crypto to whoever you choose — but a will is a public document once probate is granted, so it is the wrong place to write a seed phrase or password. What actually closes the gap is a separate, secure, but discoverable record that an executor can find and act on when the time comes.
Write down what exists — never the keys themselves.
Which exchanges hold an account, which wallets exist and roughly what they hold, and which hardware device (if any) stores the keys. This list alone turns an invisible asset into a findable one, without exposing it.
Store the actual access details somewhere secure, separately.
A password manager's emergency-access feature, a solicitor's safe custody, or a sealed instruction kept with your will — never inside the will itself, and never in a plain document that sits in an inbox.
Name a trusted person who knows where to look.
Not necessarily someone who can decrypt anything today — someone who knows the list exists, where it's kept, and who to hand it to. An executor with no idea to ask the question will never find the answer.
Keep it current as holdings change.
A list from three exchanges ago is worse than no list at all if it sends an executor hunting for an account that's been closed. This is the one step a one-off document can't do on its own — it needs maintaining.
This is precisely the gap the household-records product exists to close. The Household Continuity Dossier is the subscription that keeps this kind of record current — £195 for the first year, then £99/yr — with digital assets among its records, so a wallet or exchange holding you add today is still findable by whoever needs it, whenever that is.
The £29 Family Handover Kit is the one-off version: a finished, printable brief within one business day, no subscription and no account — and it counts in full toward the Dossier's first year if you move up within 30 days, so nothing you start with is wasted.
Domains, social accounts and the rest of your digital estate
Cryptocurrency is one slice of a digital estate, not the whole of it. Email and social media accounts, domain names, cloud storage, photo libraries and streaming subscriptions all raise their own — quite different — questions: which platforms let you nominate a legacy contact, which simply terminate the account at death, and which categories can be transferred at all. This page deliberately doesn't re-cover that ground.
For everything that isn't crypto.
The digital legacy brief is Valoren's dedicated page for the rest of a digital estate — what each major platform actually does at death, and how to plan for it while you still can.
The questions people actually type.
Checked against legislation.gov.uk, the Law Commission and HMRC's Cryptoassets Manual on 30 August 2026. Exchange processes (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance) are each a third party's own published guidance and can change without notice — confirm directly with the exchange before relying on any specific step. This page is information about how the rules and processes work, not advice on your situation — for anything turning on your own facts, take advice from a solicitor or a cryptoasset-literate tax adviser.
Two different visitors reach this page, and they need opposite things.
One of them is administering an estate right now and has just found a hardware wallet or an exchange login. The other has just realised, reading this, that their own crypto would be exactly this unreachable if nothing changes — and has the enormous advantage of time.
What to do when someone dies
The practical sequence for the first days and weeks — registration, notification, and what genuinely has to happen in what order. No account required.
Open the guide→The Household Continuity Dossier · £195 → £99/yrKeep access details findable, before they're needed
Digital assets sit alongside your other records — maintained, not written once and forgotten, so an executor can actually find what you've told us is there.
See what's included→Check the numbersWhere crypto sits in the full IHT position
Run the whole estate — crypto included — through the current thresholds, reliefs and nil-rate bands.
Open the calculator→