In 2025, who owns your digital assets in the metaverse when you die is no longer an abstract question for tech enthusiasts. It is a live problem for bereaved families, private client lawyers and executors trying to untangle crypto, NFTs and virtual accounts spread across platforms that may not even mention death in their terms. Traditional UK succession law was built around houses, bank accounts and share portfolios. It was not drafted with avatars, virtual land or wallets secured by a string of characters that only the deceased ever knew.
Recent reforms have begun to recognise digital assets as property, but there is still no comprehensive statute that cleanly explains how a metaverse estate should be inherited. Instead, families face a patchwork of property rules, platform contracts and data protection principles that often push them into grey areas. The result is financial loss, stalled probate and deeply emotional disputes over access to the digital traces a person leaves online.
This feature examines how UK law is evolving, where platform terms cut across family expectations, and what practical steps British households and advisers can take while the legal framework catches up with the metaverse.
Metaverse Wealth And the Missing Inheritance Map
The first challenge is conceptual. A modern digital estate can include assets with clear economic value alongside intensely personal data. A typical British metaverse footprint might contain:
- Cryptocurrencies are held on exchanges or in self-hosted wallets.
- Non-fungible tokens representing virtual land, digital art, in-game items or membership rights.
- Account balances and in-world assets on virtual platforms and games.
- Creator income streams from virtual events, streaming channels and digital marketplaces.
- More familiar online properties such as cloud photo libraries, email accounts and social media profiles.
Legal scholars increasingly distinguish between digital assets with financial value and wider “digital remains” that carry emotional and informational significance. Research on digital legacy has documented how often relatives now ask lawyers or platforms for access to messages, photos and profiles as part of grieving and estate administration, rather than just for money.
Despite this, public planning is minimal. A survey highlighted by the Law Society and reported by Co-op Legal Services found that 93% of people questioned had not included any digital assets in their will, and only 7% felt they properly understood what would happen to those assets on death. A 2024 poll for consumer group Which suggested that around three-quarters of UK adults had no strategy at all for their “digital death”, even though many said their most important photographs and documents existed only online.
Fun fact: In one widely cited study, only about 3% of respondents had written specific instructions about their online accounts into a will, despite most of them relying on digital services to store irreplaceable family photos and key records.
This gulf between how people live online and how they plan their estates is where the metaverse inheritance gap begins.
How UK Law Is Responding to Digital Property
From a property perspective, the UK has moved faster than many assumed. Following a major Law Commission project, the government introduced the Property Digital Assets Bill, which aims to recognise a distinct class of personal property encompassing things like crypto tokens and certain digital records.
The Law Commission concluded that some digital assets do not fit neatly into the traditional categories of “things in possession”, such as physical goods, or “things in action”, such as debts and contractual rights. Even so, it argued that English law is flexible enough to treat these “data objects” as items of property that can be owned, transferred and used as security. The Bill is intended to clarify this position in statute so that courts have a firmer footing when dealing with misappropriation, collateral and insolvency involving digital assets.
For crypto holdings and tokenised financial instruments, this is significant. If a token is firmly recognised as property, it can, in principle, be gifted in a will, pass under intestacy rules and be pursued by executors as part of the estate. Academic commentary on crypto and succession has broadly welcomed this direction, noting that property status is a prerequisite before courts can reliably resolve disputes over ownership at death.
However, Bill does not attempt to write a full code on the inheritance of digital assets. It leaves them inside the existing structure of wills, intestacy and trust law, where the general rule is that anything a person owns at death falls into their estate unless a specific arrangement says otherwise. In the metaverse context, that is only half the story.
Many high-value digital positions are embedded in accounts governed by platform terms that restrict transfer or access, even though national law would treat the associated rights as part of the estate.
Platform Contracts and Frustrated Heirs
The tension between national inheritance rules and platform contracts is starkest with social media and cloud storage, but it now extends across virtual worlds and gaming platforms.
In many metaverse and game environments, what users “own” is not a free-standing asset but a personal license. Terms of service often give the operator broad discretion to suspend accounts, remove content or prohibit transfers outside its own marketplace. Some explicitly say accounts are personal and non-transferable, without any carve-out for death. Others say nothing at all about what happens when a user dies, leaving families to navigate generic support links.
Consumer guidance from charities and regulators is blunt on this point. There is no single statute that forces technology companies to hand over control of an account when the UK user dies. Instead, each provider sets its own approach: memorialization settings for social media, “legacy contacts” on certain platforms, and inactivity tools that trigger after a period of silence.
For metaverse estates with real money at stake, this can mean:
- A wallet or vault on a centralised NFT marketplace may be locked or require extensive verification before heirs can reach it.
- In-game assets linked to an avatar may technically be property under English law, but practically unreachable if a platform refuses to alter credentials.
- Subscription-based metaverse offices or land plots may expire if payment cards fail and no one with authority steps in quickly.
Practitioners report that even when a will clearly names a beneficiary for digital assets, executors often struggle to obtain basic information about what exists on each platform, particularly when foreign law clauses and offshore jurisdictions appear in the small print. Providers may insist on specific local court orders or apply internal policies that sit awkwardly with UK probate documents.
The result is a growing category of lost digital wealth, not because the law says assets cannot be inherited, but because contractual structures and platform practices make practical control a prolonged negotiation or, in some cases, a dead end.
Privacy Data Rights and Digital Remains
Beyond financial claims, digital heritage intersects privacy and data protection. Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, data protection rights apply to living individuals. Those statutes do not directly cover personal data after death, although confidentiality rules, human rights principles and sector-specific codes can still influence how data is handled.
This creates dilemmas around access to intimate communications and life logs. Academic work on “digital resurrection” and post-mortem data use has highlighted widespread unease at AI systems that can recreate a deceased person’s conversational patterns using their messages, voice notes and recordings where no clear consent was given while they were alive.
In metaverse settings, where users may have rich avatars, voice streams and detailed behavioural histories, the capacity for posthumous simulation is even more pronounced. Yet only a handful of legal systems have bespoke rules that answer questions such as:
- Can a platform create a simulated version of a deceased user for others to interact with?
- Do heirs have any right to prevent or request such simulations?
- How should competing wishes between relatives be resolved?
European research initiatives on digital succession and digital remains have called for more explicit rights for people to set binding preferences about what should happen to their online identities, and for greater alignment across borders. Proposals include default rules that favour deletion unless the person actively opted in to certain types of posthumous use.
In the UK, executors confronted with these issues often find themselves weighing the emotional needs of survivors, the contractual stance of platforms and the inferred privacy expectations of the deceased, for example, from their lifetime choices about sharing and memorialization. It is an area where law, ethics and technology are running on different clocks.
Cross-Border Puzzles for Crypto and Virtual Estates
Thecross-border naturee of metaverse assets adds another layer of uncertainty. A single digital portfolio might involve:
- Tokens odecentraliseded blockchains with infrastructure and users spread across continents.
- Accounts with companies incorporated in the United States, the European Union, Asia or offshore centres.
- Heirs’ resident in different jurisdictions with their own succession and tax rules.
Traditional private international law relies on distinctions between movable property, which typically follows the law of the owner’s domicile, and immovable property, which follows the law of where it is located. For intangible virtual assets, those categories are not obvious. Is a plot of virtual land more like a piece of real estate or like a bundle of contractual rights? Where is a crypto asset “situated” when it is recorded on a distributed ledger?
HMRC guidance on crypto has tended to treat such assets for UK tax purposes located where the beneficial owner is resident or domiciled, rather than where servers sit or where an exchange is incorporated. That provides some clarity for inheritance tax, but there is no universal approach internationally, and the position for hybrid metaverse assets tied to specific platforms is even less clear.
Organisations such as UNIDROIT and the Hague Conference on Private International Law have launched projects on digital assets and private law, looking at how rules on jurisdiction and applicable law should apply to decentralised and platform-based assets in areas including insolvency and succession. Over time, this may produce more predictable answers on which court should hear a dispute about a metaverse estate and which law it should apply.
For now, advisers often must navigate a patchwork of local interpretations, tax positions and platform choices, especially where significant crypto holdings or NFT portfolios are involved.
How Private Client Practice Is Adapting
Faced with this uncertainty, UK private client lawyers and professional bodies have focused on practical mitigation. Guidance from the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and the Law Society now treats digital assets as a routine part of will drafting, not a niche.
Standard recommendations include:
- Raising digital assets in every will instruction meeting and asking clients directly about crypto, NFTs, metaverse accounts and online business interests.
- Encouraging clients to maintain a secure inventory of important accounts, devices and holdings, indicating where they are stored and how they are used.
- Including clauses that empower executors to deal with digital assets and engage with service providers, sometimes supported by separate letters of wishes.
- Warning clients not to place passwords or private keys directly in a will, which could become public on probate, but to consider secure password managers or sealed memoranda under separate cover.
Specialist commentary stresses that executors should treat digital holdings as time-sensitive. Where there is evidence of substantial crypto or NFT value, they may need to act quickly to prevent loss through platform inactivity, hacking or volatility. In some cases, estates have engaged digital forensics or recovery firms to assist.
On the industry side, there are modest signs of progress. Some metaverse and game operators have started to develop clearer procedures for next of kin, modelled loosely on the “legacy” tools pioneered by major social networks. These might include options to nominate a digital contact or to specify whether an avatar and its associated items should be deleted, frozen or transferred on proof of death.
Yet with no statutory baseline, coverage is inconsistent. Larger, regulated companies may invest in well-resourced legacy processes, while smaller or offshore platforms provide minimal assistance or none at all.
Practical Steps for Families and Lawmakers
Against this backdrop, there are concrete actions that individuals, advisers and policymakers in the UK can take while the legal framework for metaverse inheritance evolves.
For individuals and families:
- Treat digital and metaverse assets as part of your estate planning, not as separate from “real life” wealth.
- Keep a secure, regularly updated list of key accounts and holdings, along with guidance on where credentials are stored, so executors know where to look.
- Make use of existing legacy features on major platforms, such as nomination of trusted contacts or clear instructions on memorialization and deletion.
For advisers:
- Integrate questions about digital assets into standard fact-finding templates and engagement letters.
- Build basic familiarity with crypto, NFTs and major metaverse platforms into continuing professional development, so that obvious red flags are not missed.
- Ensure that estate administration checklists include tasks such as securing digital devices, identifying online income streams and reviewing platform terms.
For policymakers:
- Consider extending the Property Digital Assets Bill with targeted provisions on succession, including presumptions around executor authority to access and manage digital estates.
- Work with consumer groups and industry to develop a code of practice on handling accounts at death, covering transparency, timelines, evidence standards and respect for stated wishes.
- Align digital inheritance policy with broader digital identity and data strategies, so that rights in digital remains are not left entirely to platform contracts.
International cooperation will be crucial as more value is held in decentralised networks and cross-border platforms. The UK’s ability to protect its citizens’ metaverse estates will partly depend on shared norms around recognition and enforcement.
A New Kind of Legacy in the Metaverse
Inheritance in the metaverse is not just about speculative tokens or game items. It is about who controls the stories, images and communities that make up a person’s online life. The legal system is only beginning to recognise that these digital traces form part of what people understand as their legacy.
By clarifying the property status of digital assets, improving platform practices and embedding digital planning into everyday life, the UK can gradually replace today’s legal void over digital inheritance with a more predictable landscape. If that does not happen, significant slices of personal and family wealth, both emotional and financial, risk being stranded behind forgotten passwords and inflexible contract clauses.
For now, the safest working assumption is clear. Unless you deliberately plan for it, your metaverse life will not organise itself when you are gone. Law and industry practice are moving, but they have not yet caught up with the digital worlds that millions of people now inhabit every day.
