What Happens to Your Assets When You Log Off for Good
An interview with Pawel Soproniuk, Co-Founder at LegacyApp by Sean Murphy
A gamer forges a sword inside a game worth a thousand pounds on the open market, and if something happens to him, where does it go? A whisky collector worries his family will simply drink the bottle in the cupboard, not realising it cost twenty thousand pounds. Somewhere a Bitcoin holder buys a hundred euros of it every month and no one knows where the seed phrase is written down. These are the small, human gaps that Pawel Soproniuk built LegacyApp to close.
Soproniuk is a co-founder of LegacyApp, a European startup with founders in Poland and the United Kingdom, and its purpose is simple. It is a secure notepad on a phone, a place to keep the information those closest to someone will need once they pass away, and that today that information is usually lost. Not an alternative to a will, but a place for the practical and the private details of someone life: a life insurance policy no one knew about, an investment product, a debt, how to get into a laptop, and how to access a personal email account. The app checks in periodically to ask whether the user is alright, and as long as they answer, nothing happens. If they miss the prompts twice, first in the app and then by email, it begins releasing the prepared information.
The first worry this raises is obvious, given how many notifications anyone ignores in a day, but Soproniuk says the safeguards against a false trigger are strong. To guard against a false alarm, there is a layer Soproniuk calls trusted friends, people the user nominates who must confirm that something has actually happened before anything reaches their beneficiaries. It is optional and free, a check on the dead man's switch at the centre of the design. The starting point everyone reaches for, he says, is the mailbox. Accessing his own email, he notes, is the single most important instruction he has stored, because so much of a person's digital life resets through it. “The door to your digital identity,” is how he describes the humble inbox.
The technical choice that makes the business viable is a refusal to hold anything resembling sensitive data. Most digital-legacy services run a vault, storing information on their own servers and promising to release it when the owner dies, which is exactly the liability Soproniuk decided no bank or insurer would want to touch. LegacyApp keeps everything on the user's own device and backs it up, encrypted, to their personal cloud drive, Google Drive first because nearly everyone already has one. A nominated person can later retrieve the encrypted copy without ever knowing the owner's password, the file unlocked by a key split in two, half generated by the company and half defined by the user. “The best way to protect the data is not to have this data,” he says.
It cannot be stolen from a company that never held it, and even if LegacyApp disappeared, the notes would still sit on the owner's phone.
That architecture is also the route to market. The world is entering what everyone in the industry calls the great wealth transfer, an intergenerational handover of assets on a scale without precedent; Cerulli Associates puts the figure at around eighty-four trillion dollars through 2045 in the United States alone. Soproniuk points to Capgemini's annual wealth report flagging help with passing on a legacy as a top expected service from financial institutions, and LegacyApp is built to sit alongside a bank or insurer rather than compete with one. The company is already working with an insurance broker in Poland as a value-added service.
The scale of the digital afterlife is easy to underestimate. The Oxford Internet Institute has projected that dead users could outnumber the living on Facebook by around 2070, and possibly reach nearly five billion by the end of the century, which gives some sense of how much of anyone's life now sits behind a password. Most services have quiet provisions for this that hardly anyone sets up, Facebook's legacy contact, Google's inactive account manager, and part of what LegacyApp does is simply walk users through those few clicks. The point is less any single account than the sprawl of them, and the fact that taking an inbox to the grave can mean that subscriptions are still being paid with the deceased persons money.
The most ambitious piece of legacy app is their protocol rather than the product. There is, Soproniuk points out, no standard for passing this kind of information between institutions, so the company has published one, an open-source legacy protocol on GitHub that any insurer, or even a game developer, can adopt. A life insurer could add a button on the policy download page that lets a customer file the policy straight into their legacy app, and a game studio could do the same for a valuable in-game item. The heir does not need the logins, since they will have to present a death certificate to each institution anyway. What they need is to know the thing existed and where to look.
He expects LegacyApp (or products like it) to become something everyone eventually uses, an infrastructure for moving assets between generations rather than a single application, which is the reason he is so insistent on not holding the data himself. It comes back to the whisky in the cupboard and the sword that lives inside a game. Those things will outlast their owner. Whether anyone knows they exist, and where to find them, is the question Soproniuk is trying to answer.
