Estate Planning For Digital Assets Nine Years After RUFADAA

In April 2017, if you had the latest technology, you were sporting the iPhone 7, and potentially grieving that, for the first time, your phone did not have a headphone jack. You were placing calls and downloading data on a 4G network—and that data use wasn’t attributable to TikTok, because the platform had not been developed yet. If you were using that iPhone 7 to track activity in the Ohio General Assembly, you also witnessed Ohio’s adoption of the Revised Uni-form Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (“RUFADAA”). Today, approximately 91% of U.S. adults owns a smartphone,¹ and they check those phones, on average, about 186 times per day.² Some of them are using that phone to check the status of their Bitcoin holdings, as ap-proximately 28% of Americans now own cryptocurrency.³ In April 2017, Bitcoin was trading at $1,080 per coin, and it had fallen about 46% from its peak to sit at $68,000 per coin in April 2026. It is safe to say that our relationship with technology has changed