How Trustees Can Plan for Crypto Assets in Estate Administration
In January 2009, Hal Finney received the very first crypto asset transaction from bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney was a master cryptographer and had been researching a way to create a new type of currency that was private and unbeholden to governments or institutions. A post on a cryptography mailing list about something called Bitcoin intrigued him. Bitcoin pioneered using cryptographic public keys and private key pairs as a way to create a digital currency. Using this method, Nakamoto sent ten bitcoins to Hal Finney as a test. Since then, cryptocurrency has exploded into a completely new type of asset class. Proponents believe that the decentralized finance model behind crypto assets will disrupt traditional finance.