In the landscape of Indian estate planning, a common misconception keeps getting repeated: that appointing a "nominee" is enough to pass assets on.
It isn't.
Indian courts have been unambiguous about this for decades. A nominee is an administrative bridge, nothing more. Succession is the legal foundation that actually decides who owns what. And in the last few years, a third variable has quietly rewritten the whole conversation: accessibility. In the Web3 age, legal entitlement means nothing if no one can open the wallet.
This piece walks through how the law draws that line, where digital assets break the framework, and what a modern solution has to look like.
The legal hierarchy: custodianship vs. ownership
The core conflict is between a "trustee" and a "beneficiary."
The nominee is the gatekeeper.
As established in *Smt. Sarbati Devi v. Smt. Usha Devi* (1984) and reaffirmed in *Shakti Yezdani v. Jayanand Jayant Salgaonkar* (2023), a nominee is merely a custodian. They provide a valid discharge to banks, insurers, and registrars so those institutions can release assets without waiting for probate. But the nominee holds those assets in trust for the legal heirs. They do not own them.
The legal heir is the owner.
Ownership is governed by the Indian Succession Act, 1925, or by personal laws depending on the deceased's religion and the nature of the estate. A legal heir is the person entitled to absolute ownership under the rules of testamentary or intestate succession. Their rights are permanent. They can sell, transfer, rent, or gift the inherited property. This is the only "affirmative" title recognised by the courts.
There are narrow statutory exceptions.
Under the Insurance Laws (Amendment) Act, 2015, "beneficial nominees" – specifically immediate family members named on a life insurance policy, gain absolute ownership of the policy proceeds. This is one of the rare places where nomination aligns cleanly with conclusive succession.
Real estate follows the trustee rule.
In Co-operative Housing Societies, a nominee may be granted immediate possession of a flat so the society can keep its membership records clean. But possession is not ownership. The nominee must eventually hand the flat over to whoever is named in the Will or entitled under succession law.
Shares follow the same rule.
Following the *Shakti Yezdani* decision in 2023, it is now settled that nomination in shares does not grant absolute ownership to the exclusion of legal heirs. The depository or registrar will transmit shares to the nominee, but the nominee holds them on behalf of the people who actually inherit them.
Digital sovereignty: nomination vs. succession in the Web3 era
The rise of Web3 assets – cryptocurrencies, NFTs, monetised digital accounts, on-chain identities, has created a legal vacuum that traditional estate planning was never designed to fill.
Traditional assets rely on a settled "nominee as trustee" framework. Digital assets usually have no nomination feature at all, which makes succession the only affirmative path to ownership. And even then, ownership on paper does not guarantee access in practice.
Most decentralised wallets have no nomination field.
MetaMask, Phantom, Rabby, Rainbow, none of them let you name a beneficiary. There is nobody at the other end of the line to honour the nomination even if you wrote one down.
Centralised exchanges treat nominees as custodians.
Even on CEXs that do allow you to register a nominee, that nominee is legally a custodian. They may receive the funds, but they are still bound to pass them on to the rightful heirs.
Self-custody crypto and NFTs have no built-in nomination.
Assets held in cold storage, hardware wallets, or paper backups are bearer instruments. Without the private key or seed phrase, those assets are lost forever on the day the owner dies, no matter how clearly the Will names an heir.
Licensed digital goods are not inheritable at all.
Accounts on platforms like Spotify, Apple TV, Kindle, or Audible are non-transferable licenses. They typically expire with the account holder. There is nothing to nominate and nothing to inherit.
Privacy data is not the same as property.
The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 introduces a "Right to Nominate" for data management – the ability to memorialise or delete a loved one's digital presence. Useful, necessary, long overdue. But this is a right over privacy, not a right over the economic value sitting inside those accounts.
Succession is the conclusive process, not nomination
The Supreme Court has ruled on this more than once, and the position has not moved.
A nominee holds property in trust for the legal heirs. A nominee is legally bound to transfer that property to them once their status is established. Nomination is a convenience for the institution releasing the asset. Succession is the mechanism that decides who actually owns it.
When families skip over this distinction, they create the exact situation that litigation thrives on: two or more people with plausible claims and no clear instruction.
The litigation burden
Roughly 76% of civil litigation in India stems from property and family disputes. Clear succession documents – a properly drafted Will, identified heirs, documented assets, are the single most effective preventive tool available.
Your Will overrides your nominations wherever you intend it to. That sentence is the one most families never hear in time. A well-drafted Will protects your family from the legal maze of contested inheritance, from the slow grind of probate, and from the much slower grind of internal family disagreement about what you "really wanted."
The Web3 gap: assets without nominees
Modern assets – cryptocurrencies, NFTs, digital keys, monetised content, creator-economy income, do not fit into the traditional nomination framework at all.
The "lost" problem.
A bank account without a nominee can still be recovered. The heir files for a Succession Certificate, waits six to twelve months, pays two to three percent of the account value in court fees, and eventually gets access. Slow and expensive, but recoverable.
A self-custody wallet without a private key is not recoverable. Not by a court, not by a lawyer, not by the exchange, not by anyone.
Roughly 20% of Bitcoin is gone forever.
Chainalysis estimates that around 3.7 million BTC has been permanently lost – largely because owners died or lost access without a succession plan. That is not a statistic about hacks or scams. It is a statistic about the absence of basic planning.
The legal vacuum around VDAs.
Virtual Digital Assets are taxed at 30% in India under the VDA tax regime, which means the state treats them as real property with real value. And yet they frequently exist outside the physical Will, creating what can only be described as "shadow estates" – assets heirs cannot access, cannot claim, and in many cases, never even learn about.
Solving the crisis: the BlockWill approach
Traditional Wills fail the digital age for one specific structural reason: they become public documents during probate. Listing a private key or seed phrase inside a Will is security suicide. Anyone reading the probate record can drain the wallet before the heir ever sees a rupee.
BlockWill is designed to close that gap by merging legal validity with cryptographic security.
Aligning the legal heir with the digital recipient.
BlockWill lets you create a Smart Will where the person who inherits the asset on paper is also the person who inherits the access in practice. There is no "middleman" nominee standing between the heir and the wallet. The legal entitlement and the technical access move together.
Automated succession through blockchain triggers.
Traditional Wills rely on manual execution – somebody reading the document, somebody else enforcing it, courts eventually stepping in. BlockWill uses blockchain-based triggers. If a user is inactive for a defined period, or if an executor confirms a qualifying event, the smart contract executes. Assets do not get lost to the void just because nobody knew where to look.
Privacy-first legal planning.
BlockWill stores your intent and legal instructions on-chain while keeping the sensitive access data itself encrypted. Your heirs inherit the instruction to unlock; they do not inherit a public record of how. This prevents the "public probate" problem where the heirs' own digital security is compromised the moment the Will is filed.
A unified inventory.
BlockWill clubs traditional asset records – property, insurance, bank accounts, mutual funds, with Web3 wallets, NFTs, creator-economy accounts, and domain portfolios. A single, legally defensible framework covering the entire estate, instead of a Will for the "real" assets and a prayer for the digital ones.
What this actually changes
Nomination alone will not pass your wealth on. It never did, and Indian courts have said so since 1984. In the Web3 era, even a properly drafted Will is not enough on its own, because legal entitlement without accessibility is just a piece of paper describing something nobody can open.
The modern answer has three parts: a clear succession plan that names the right heirs, an inventory that actually includes digital assets, and a secure mechanism that delivers access at the right moment to the right people.
Move beyond simple nominations. Avoid the "single point of failure" in your estate planning. Do not let your legacy turn into a tug-of-war between beneficiaries, assets, and access. That is what BlockWill is built for.