Over 106 million people worldwide hold cryptocurrency, as of 2021, and that figure is only set to boom further as digital assets become increasingly nestled into the mainstream.

Withcrypto's growing popularity, a rising number of people will no doubt be wondering what happens to your cryptocurrency stash afterthey die. For the living, there may also be some curiosity about whether its possible to inherit cryptocurrency from a deceased relative.

But first, a disclaimer! This is not financial advice. Please consult professional financial and legal advice to understand the risks involved. This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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If you're looking to inherit crypto held in a deceased person's wallet, whether its an offline (cold) or online (hot) wallet, its important to know the private key.

In short, the private key is like a password; a cryptographically generated code that grants access to your crypto. There is also a seed phrase, a human-readable representation of a private key that consists of 12, 18, or 24 words generated by your cryptocurrency wallet that stores all the information needed to recover cryptocurrency funds.

Without the key or seed phrase, a deceased person's cryptocurrency will be inaccessible and remain lost on the blockchain. Just like a password, however, you shouldnt tell people your private key or seed phrase unless you wish to give them total access to your portfolio.

You may have heard the remarkable story of Gerald Cotten, a cryptocurrency trader who died suddenly aged 30, leaving up to US$190 million worth of his clients crypto permanently locked in inaccessible offline wallets.

Owners of crypto assets who die without a Will or an available private key may create a similar predicament behind, leaving their beneficiaries unable to get their hands on the cryptocurrency.

If the cryptocurrency is in a coin exchange,rather than a wallet, things may be a little easier (if not less secure).

If you hold your crypto on an internet-based coin exchange, like Binance or Coinbase, you don't actually own your private keys they do.When obtaining a deceased person's account, you are effectively relying on that company to hand over the crypto.

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange and provider of wallets, has created a protocolallowing the transfer of an account in the event of death.

However, the responsibility lies with the account holder and beneficiaries need a few things to obtain the assets: the persons death certificate, their latest Will and Testament, and/or Probate Documents, plus a signed letter by the person named in the Probate Documents instructing Coinbase on what to do with the balance of the Coinbase account.

If a person doesnt mention their crypto assets in their will, its very unlikely youll be able to obtain them legally.

Just like any asset, like stocks or gold, Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies can be subject to tax. However, most countries have still not fully got to grips with the intangible qualities of digital assets and the law can be relatively hazy in places.

The UK recently laid out a policy paper called Cryptoassets: tax for individualsstating cryptocurrencies can be subject to inheritance tax and capital gains tax.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the US also considers cryptocurrency holdings to be property for tax purposes, meaning your virtual currency is taxed in the same way as any other assets you own.

However, different countries have different rules and different loopholes. In the UK, for instance, crypto assets left to a married partner will benefit from 100 percent Inheritance Tax relief, provided the surviving spouse is a permanent UK resident.

So, if youre looking for particular exemptions, its best to check laws in your jurisdiction and, if in doubt, seek legal advice.

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What Happens To Cryptocurrency When You Die, And Can You Inherit It? - IFLScience

One of the most tried-and-true methods for luring people into a scam is to promise victims "insider" access to financial riches that ordinary people can't get.It's how Wall Street financier Bernie Madoff signed up thousands of eager investors for his too-good-to-be-true Ponzi scheme. Now it's being used by scammers who promise their victims huge gains if they just install and use "special" smartphone apps meant only for insiders.

The scam is called "CryptoRom," and it's been around for a few months. As described by Sophos Labs researcher Jagadeesh Chandraiah yesterday (March 16), it's a trifecta of malice, combining romance scams, cryptocurrency scams and malicious Android and iPhone apps the latter of which are usually very rare.

Victims have lost tens of thousands of dollars in these schemes. Just one of the many Bitcoin addresses used by the crooks has gathered $1.3 million in ill-gotten gains; you can probably multiply that several times to get an idea of the total take.

The scheme initially targeted China, Japan, southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, but it has now jumped to western Europe and the U.S.

One victim told Sophos they themselves had been scammed, and said a friend was also "using [a] similar app called 'UBS global' + Binance."

"They are providing trading in crypto," the victim said. "Now when he tried to withdraw amount, they are asking for paid membership of $6,000."

Most victims are initially contacted through online dating portals, such as "Bumble, Tinder, Facebook dating and Grindr," as an earlier Sophos report said. Many of those sites offer some of the best dating apps we've tested.

Recently, Chandraiah said, some victims have been contacted via random WhatsApp messages, apparently after the crooks profiled them via social media and saw they had money to spend.

"We suspect that the crooks obtained contact information for their targets either through their own social media accounts or through compromised websites," Chandraiah wrote. "They also seem to obtain publicly available information and target those who are already into investment and cryptocurrency."

When dating apps are involved, the scammer uses a fake profile to build trust with the victim over several days or even weeks. Then the scammer tells the victims about a secret cryptocurrency investment that will make the victim a lot of money the victim just has to install a special app.

Here's our first tip on how to avoid these scams: Don't trust anyone who claims to be your soul mate, yet never seems to be able to meet you in person, or even to have a FaceTime date.

Second tip: If someone you don't know tells you they have a special tip on how to make money using cryptocurrency, run away fast.

These special apps aren't in Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store and must be sideloaded. That's easy to do on Android, but what about Apple devices? Doesn't Apple forbid users from installing iPhone apps that come from outside the App Store?

Not quite. Apple has a few procedures for letting app developers and large companies distribute apps privately.

Big companies can install specific profiles on employee devices that let the iPhones and iPads install company-specific apps. Developers can get two different companion apps that allow sideloading of iOS apps for testing purposes first during the initial development phase, and then later on for "test flights" just before formal submission to the App Store.

Crooks, including those running the CryptoRom scams, have been known to abuse the enterprise-deployment and developer-testing features. And now, as Sophos reports, they're starting to use Apple's TestFlight beta-testing feature to infect as many as 10,000 victims at a time.

In these cases, the victims are first asked to install the real TestFlight app from the App Store. The presence of that app lets an iPhone user then download and install what appears to be a "special" version of a well-known cryptocurrency or finance app from a website.

These are fakes, of course, but to the victim they look like real apps provisioned by CoinBase, RobinHood, Bitfinex, Binance or other cryptocurrency platforms.

Tip No. 3: If someone who isn't your employer asks you to sideload an Android or iOS app, don't. It's probably a scam with Android; with iOS, it definitely is.

Once the fake app is all set up, the victim is asked to buy Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency through a legitimate exchange, then transfer it to the crooks through the "special" smartphone app.

Initially, Chandraiah said, the victims will indeed start to make money. They're even allowed to cash out part or all of their initial investments.

But then the scammers prey on the promise of even bigger bucks to get the victims to invest more money. They'll even "lend" the victim an amount to make it easier. And that second round of investments is the one the victims will never see again.

Don't get us wrong the investments do grow, at least according to what you see in the bogus app. But then there's a catch.

"When victims try to withdraw funds from their big 'profit,'" Chandraiah wrote, "the crooks use the app to inform them that they need to pay a 'tax' of 20% of their profits before funds can be withdrawn and threaten that all their investments will be confiscated by tax authorities if they do not pay."

If the victims do pay the "tax," that then gets "frozen" by the "authorities" and the money is still stuck.

This scam has become so widespread, Chandraiah wrote, than a secondary scam industry has sprung up "promising" to help victims recover their funds.

"Exploiting this desperation, a number of bogus cryptocurrency recovery services have sprung up that specifically target CryptoRom victims."

At this point, may victims realize their only option is to contact the police. But even then, there's often little that can be done. Cryptocurrency transactions cannot be reversed, and even when the chain of transactions is transparent, as with Bitcoin, there may be little legal recourse.

"Because of the nature of cryptocurrency and the fact that cross-border foreign transactions are involved," Chandraiah wrote, "it is difficult at best to recover funds through law enforcement or other legal channels."

Final tip: Don't invest cryptocurrency with someone you don't know.

Granted, these crooks have convinced many victims that they are using Binance, Bitfinex, Coinbase or other legitimate exchanges.

But it takes a big leap of faith to believe that those well-known cryptocurrency platforms would have secret spaces in which only a privileged few get to trade their assets and make more money than anyone else. Then again, maybe that doesn't seem so crazy.

Today's best Sophos Home deals

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Fake iPhone apps used to steal millions in cryptocurrency - Tom's Guide

Over the past 24 hours, BNBs (CRYPTO: BNB) price rose 3.26% to $388.77. This continues its positive trend over the past week where it has experienced a 5.0% gain, moving from $368.57 to its current price. As it stands right now, the coins all-time high is $686.31.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for BNB over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are bollinger bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

The trading volume for the coin has tumbled 18.0% over the past week while the circulating supply of the coin has risen 0.05%. This brings the circulating supply to 168.14 million, which makes up an estimated 100.0% of its max supply of 168.14 million. According to our data, the current market cap ranking for BNB is #4 at $65.37 billion.

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Cryptocurrency BNB's Price Increased More Than 3% Within 24 hours - Benzinga - Benzinga

Ethereum mining is not going through its best moment, and as if this were not enough, new cryptocurrencies hit the market this year, which makes the use of ethereum even more complicated.

This will make Ethereum no longer a profitable coin to mine and will usher in its Proof of Stake protocol update with Ethereum 2.0. For this reason, we bring you different alternatives to Ethereum to mine.

The first of the options that we are going to name is Firo, better known as Zcoin. This crypto is born from the Zerocoin protocol and has its own blockchain. This project had a very similar name to Zcash, with which they share several aspects but are different. Zcash is based on the Zerocash protocol and is a hard fork of Bitcoin. For this reason, the creators decided to change the name to Firo.

Firo's mission is to provide a service that facilitates marketing and individual financial freedom when transacting, as long as it is something legitimate and does not inflict any harm on other people. Its objective is to provide this type of service without ever leaving aside the maximum possible anonymity, in addition to transparency.

This is quite an interesting project founded by one of the most renowned blockchain technicians by Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Cardano. Ergo has its own blockchain, its native governance token called Ergo (ERG) and also has its own language for programming smart contracts.

The mission of this project is to revolutionize blockchain technology in terms of financial contracts, using smart contracts. The Smart Contracts programming language created by the founders of Ergo brings many advantages that chains like Bitcoin do not have. With these Smart Contracts you can detail who can use the cryptocurrency, for what purpose and how to do it.

Of all the previous alternatives to Ethereum, we believe that this is the favorite to be the replacement of Ethereum in terms of mining. Ravencoin (RVN) is a hard fork of Bitcoin, created with the intention of being a blockchain that is used in specific cases. Its objective is to facilitate the exchange of money between two pairs.

This project was launched in 2018 and has some differences from the bitcoin protocol. Although RVN has a Proof of Work protocol, over time they changed their mining algorithm from "X16R" to "KawPow". This brought with it the advantage that it is not necessary to mine this crypto with ASIC, but with boards with 4GB of RAM or more it is already possible.

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Ethereum: 3 alternatives to the popular cryptocurrency - Marca English

Over the past 24 hours, Axie Infinitys (CRYPTO: AXS) price rose 3.46% to $50.54. This continues its positive trend over the past week where it has experienced a 10.0% gain, moving from $46.23 to its current price. As it stands right now, the coins all-time high is $164.90.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for Axie Infinity over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are bollinger bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

Axie Infinitys trading volume has climbed 22.0% over the past week along with the circulating supply of the coin, which has increased 0.36%. This brings the circulating supply to 74.11 million, which makes up an estimated 27.45% of its max supply of 270.00 million. According to our data, the current market cap ranking for AXS is #34 at $3.76 billion.

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Cryptocurrency Axie Infinity Up More Than 3% In 24 hours - Benzinga - Benzinga