Does a nominee inherit your digital assets in India?
Under Section 14 of India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, a nominee can exercise your data rights after your death — access, correction, erasure. A nominee does not inherit ownership. Who owns your digital assets is decided by your will and by succession law, not by nomination.
What Section 14 of the DPDP Act actually says
Section 14 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 gives a Data Principal the right to nominate another individual to exercise their rights under the Act in the event of death or incapacity. The Act defines incapacity as inability to exercise those rights “due to unsoundness of mind or infirmity of body”.
This is India’s first statutory recognition that your rights over your own personal data do not simply evaporate when you die. Before it, what happened to a deceased person’s account was governed almost entirely by the platform’s own terms of service rather than by Indian law.
You can read the section itself on Indian Kanoon. It is short — two subsections — and it is worth reading, because most of what is written about it online overstates what it does.
What a nominee can and cannot do
A DPDP nominee exercises rights. They do not receive assets. The distinction is the whole point: a nominee may ask a company to hand over, correct or delete your personal data, but that authority does not make them the owner of anything of value inside the account.
| A nominee can | A nominee cannot |
|---|---|
| Request access to your personal data held by a company | Take ownership of money, tokens or balances in the account |
| Ask for correction of inaccurate personal data | Override what your will says about who inherits |
| Request erasure of your personal data | Displace legal heirs under succession law |
| Raise a grievance on your behalf with the company | Claim assets a succession certificate assigns to someone else |
As the firm King Stubb & Kasiva puts it in their analysis of Section 14, the nominee does not automatically inherit the economic value of data — loyalty points and wallet balances among their examples — because those remain governed by succession and contract law rather than by the DPDP Act.
Why nomination has never meant inheritance in India
Nomination and inheritance are separate mechanisms throughout Indian law, not only under the DPDP Act. A nominee on a bank account, an insurance policy or a demat account receives custody so the institution has someone to deal with. Ownership still passes under the will, or under succession law where there is none.
This surprises people because the everyday use of “nominee” implies beneficiary. It does not. The nominee is a receiver on behalf of the estate, and the estate is distributed according to succession law. Naming your brother as nominee on an account does not disinherit your children.
Do the Succession Acts cover digital assets at all?
Not explicitly. Neither the Indian Succession Act, 1925 nor the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 makes any reference to digital property, digital accounts or platform-held assets. Digital assets are inherited under general principles written long before the internet, which is why so much here is unsettled.
An analysis published by SCC Online in February 2026 makes the point directly, and notes the Information Technology Act, 2000 is similarly silent on succession. Indian courts have recognised intangible things as property in other contexts, but no Indian statute yet addresses digital asset succession as such.
Does any of this apply to cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrency is property in India. In Rhutikumari v. Zanmai Labs, decided 25 October 2025, the Madras High Court held that crypto “is a property, which is capable of being enjoyed and possessed in a beneficial form” and capable of being held in trust. That settles its character, not its succession.
The case arose from the WazirX cyberattack and was an application for interim relief under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996. It says nothing about inheritance, nominees or succession, and it is frequently cited as though it does. Treat it as establishing that crypto is property capable of being held in trust — which matters — and nothing further. The LiveLaw analysis sets out the holding in full.
There is also no statutory nominee system for cryptocurrency in India comparable to the one that exists for bank accounts, demat accounts or insurance. Some exchanges offer a nomination feature under their own terms, but that is contract, not statute, and it still requires succession documentation before anything is released.
The problem nomination does not solve
Even a nominee with undisputed legal authority still needs the password. Indian law can determine who owns a crypto wallet, an encrypted drive or a password manager. It cannot produce the key. Ownership is a legal question and access is a cryptographic one, and settling the first does not settle the second.
The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy put this more precisely than any product page could. Writing in “When a User Dies, Who Gets the Password?” in July 2026, Dr. Ishan Atrey observes that the law may recognise who should receive digital assets as legal heirs, but that this does not automatically mean they will have the means to obtain them.
That gap is not a legal problem and no amendment to the Succession Acts will close it. It is an engineering problem: somebody has to arrange, before death, for the keys to reach the right people afterwards — without handing them over while the owner is alive.
Where Legatus fits, and where it does not
Legatus addresses access, not ownership. It encrypts your credentials and documents in your browser and releases them to nominees you designate after two of three confirm independently, an administrator reviews a death certificate, and a 72-hour hold passes. It does not decide who inherits anything.
Naming someone a nominee in Legatus is not a testamentary act and does not substitute for a will. If your will and your Legatus nominees disagree about who should end up with an asset, the will and succession law govern the outcome — Legatus has simply made sure the asset can be opened at all. Treat the two as complementary: the will settles entitlement, the vault settles access.
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