You can’t take digital assets with you when you die, and up until now, it has been difficult leaving them with surviving heirs.

They’ve been locked away behind secret passwords the dearly departed failed to share with anyone.

But there may be help on the horizon.

Revenue in the digital assets space is projected to reach $56 billion this year, but legacy practices when it comes to crypto and non-fungible tokens, have not caught up.

To tackle the problem, local tech innovator Carole Reed is building Iternal, a tech firm providing a digital assets password vault that can be opened when you die. It is presided over by a lawyer and up to six trustees.

“My vault allows for artificial intelligence to check your passwords, and allows your passwords to be listed in an inventory,” she said. “You can, through one simple process, take all the accounts and shift them into your account, without the headache and heartache of trying to unravel a financial mess.”

She said a “staggering” amount of digital assets are lost due to missing passwords.

Ms Reed said: “I have seen estimates that as much as 20 per cent of NFTs are lost due to missing passwords, and up to 50 per cent of crypto.”

She said you cannot leave a password in a will because it is a public document. And leaving passwords with trustees can be difficult because they change so frequently.

“A password scribbled on a sticky note does not suffice,” Ms Reed said. “Only two in ten men give the password for their digital assets to their wives. Whether it is a trust issue or an oversight, I don’t know. And it is usually the men who die first, leaving women holding the bag.”

She has not quite worked out how probate will be handled.

“We are working with lawyers to try to seamlessly get ahead of that issue,” she said. “That is to be solved.”

She started thinking about this question after working as a curator for a folk art museum in Los Angeles, California.

“In the 1990s I created a file maker database for the art collection and shared that with other art professionals to maintain and insure their collections,” she said. “I thought it was important for artists to be able to document their provenance no matter the price point of their work.”

When non-fungible tokens came along, it was not much of a leap for her to see them as art forms.

“It will matter that these digital works have been documented and that their provenance on the blockchain will be preserved,” she said. “They also have a lot of rights on the blockchain. The second market is now really preserved for artists to get a profit where they would not have seen a profit in the past. So, it is a really powerful tool for artists to use.”

Ms Reed came to Bermuda with her family from New York in 2020 as digital nomads. They liked Bermuda so much they stayed.

She started building Iternal with the help of kickstarter InnoFund Ltd in January 2022. When that closed, she moved to the Ignite business accelerator last September.

She is working to raise $500,000 to launch her firm.

“That would cover the cost to hire a chief technology officer and pay marketing and web developers,” she said. “Once we launch with that amount of money, we can launch from there.”

She said it has not been easy.

“Women in tech have a hard road,” she said. “Only 4 per cent of women in tech find venture capital funding for their projects.”

She said there is a “bro culture” at the moment that sees young, predominantly White males dominating the emerging tech world.

When she took part in Penrose’s pitch tech competition this month, she was the only woman out of ten competitors.

But she predicted that things would get better in the next five years.

She hopes to grow Iternal with women and diversity at the forefront.

Iternal