Digital Assets in Montana Estates

Montana has encouraged its residents to own digital assets directly. The Legislature recognized digital assets as personal property in 2023, and in 2025 it brought them within the Commercial Code by adopting Article 12. Many Montanans now hold bitcoin and other digital assets themselves, on a hardware device or under a recovery phrase, rather than through an exchange. The law that governs what happens to those assets when the owner dies or becomes incapacitated has not kept pace.

That law is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which Montana adopted in 2017 and codified at Title 72, chapter 31, part 4. The Uniform Law Commission drafted the act in 2015, principally to address email, social media and online accounts, and most of its provisions govern what a custodian such as an email provider or an exchange must disclose to a fiduciary. For assets held without a custodian, the act grants authority in general terms. Section 72-31-414(3) gives a personal representative, conservator, agent or trustee the right to access any digital asset of the decedent or principal "that is not held by a custodian or subject to a terms-of-service agreement." Section 72-31-414(5) gives the fiduciary the right to access any device on which a digital asset is stored, and section 72-31-414(4) treats the fiduciary as an authorized user for purposes of the computer crime statutes. Section 72-31-414(1) applies to digital assets the same duties of care, loyalty and confidentiality that apply to tangible property.

The authority is therefore in place. What the act does not supply is the means to exercise it. A self custodied asset is controlled by whoever holds its private key or recovery phrase. Many holders now use multisignature arrangements, in which two of three keys are needed to move the asset and one key is held by a family member, an advisor or a collaborative custody service. Others leave a recovery phrase with a relative or in a safe deposit box. A relative or advisor who holds a key has no account and no terms of service and is not a custodian under the act, which therefore imposes no obligation on that person, gives a court no stated authority to order delivery of the key, and offers no protection to the person who delivers it. A collaborative custody service may fall within the act's broad definition of a custodian, but the act's procedures speak to the disclosure of a user's digital assets and do not say whether disclosure obliges the service to sign a transaction moving the asset to the estate. Nor does the act address the fiduciary's position once the asset is recovered. A trustee holding a concentrated position in a volatile asset faces the prudent investor rule's duty to diversify, and a personal representative must value the asset for the inventory, without statutory guidance on either point.

Three amendments to part 4 would close the gap. The first would authorize a court to order any person holding a key, key share or recovery information belonging to a decedent, protected person or settlor to deliver it to the fiduciary, would make clear that a custodian's obligations include joining in a transfer to the fiduciary, and would protect the person who complies. The second would provide that a fiduciary who acts in good faith on the owner's written instructions in recovering or transferring a digital asset is not liable for a loss caused by the technology itself. The third would permit a fiduciary to retain a digital asset in kind for a reasonable period of administration, or longer where the governing instrument so provides, without breaching the duty to diversify, and would set a valuation date for inventory purposes. None of these changes the substance of the 2017 act. Each gives a fiduciary a working procedure for authority the act already confers.

The question has a banking dimension as well. A trust department administering a trust that holds digital assets must decide whether it may hold them at all. Montana's state chartered banks may engage in activities authorized for national banks on application to the Division of Banking and Financial Institutions under section 32-1-362, and the Comptroller of the Currency has recognized digital asset custody as a national bank activity since 2020. That path rests on federal interpretive letters, however, and carries no state standards for segregation or control. Minnesota enacted express custody authority for its banks and credit unions in May. A trust department in Montana will meet the custody question and the Title 72 question in the same account.

The timing is favorable. The Montana Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force, created by the 2025 Legislature to study these subjects, listed updates to inheritance law among the options presented to it in its final report of July 2026, which is available from the Division at doa.mt.gov/bfid/bditf. The 2027 bill draft list includes a request to generally revise cryptocurrency laws, LC 511, whose text is not yet public. The Legislature convenes on January 4, and legislators may request additional drafts through December 5.

The amendments would serve several groups at once. Families who hold digital assets would know that their personal representatives and trustees can recover and manage them. Trust departments and individual fiduciaries would have a procedure and a measure of protection in an area where they now act at their own risk. Courts would have clear authority in a contested estate. And the state would complete, in its estate law, a framework it began in its property and commercial law.

Owners and fiduciaries should not wait for the Legislature. A Montanan who holds digital assets in self custody should have an estate plan that identifies them, grants the personal representative and trustee express authority over them, addresses whether they may be retained in kind, and provides for access in a form the fiduciary can use. A recovery phrase known only to its owner cannot be recovered by anyone after the owner's death, and no statute can change that. A trustee or personal representative administering an estate that may include such assets should secure the decedent's devices and papers promptly, determine whether any key is held by a third party, and obtain the cooperation of that party in writing before attempting any transfer. Instruments drafted now should grant the fiduciary the authority the statute does not yet provide.