Roughly 1 in 7 people are leaving unclaimed property on the table, according to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators. While the recent heavy selling in bitcoin and ether is rightly getting all the short-term attention, this estate planning issue is a longer-term one that’s likely to be exacerbated as crypto adoption and ownership increase.
Many people neglect to account for cryptocurrency in their estate plans, or they don’t let their heirs know how to access their crypto holdings. With surveys in recent years from Gallup and Pew Research estimating that 14% to 17% of U.S. adults have owned cryptocurrency, losing access to those funds is a growing concern.
“Leaving property or mutual funds behind in a will is pretty cut and dried, but with more and more assets placed in cryptocurrency, a large share of inherited assets are in danger of forfeiture,” said Azriel Baer, partner in the estate planning and administration group at law firm Farrell Fritz.
This issue could be mitigated, in part, by crypto ETFs, which are gaining popularity with investors since the first batch of spot bitcoin ETFs were approved by the SEC in 2024, such as the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), followed a few months later by ethereum spot price ETFs, such as the Fidelity Ethereum Fund ETF (FETH). These ETFs allow investors access to the crypto asset class without actually owning crypto outright, helping reduce the chances of actual crypto getting lost.
Nevertheless, estate planning mistakes among crypto owners are common and can be avoided. Here are some of the biggest issues cryptocurrency owners need to tackle sooner rather than later.
Wills, if they exist, often don’t include digital assets language
Only 24% of Americans have a will that describes how they want their money and estate managed after their death, according to a survey from Caring.com. Even people who have wills in place have not updated them for many years, with nearly one in four Americans saying they haven’t touched their wills since their original was drafted, according to the survey.
This can be problematic for many reasons. An old will may no longer reflect people’s current wishes. In a crypto-specific context, anyone who hasn’t updated their estate plan in the past several years may not have language to provide legal authority for the trustee or executor to gain access to digital assets.
“It’s very common for people not to update their estate planning documents for 10, 20 years or sometimes longer. If that’s the case, you’re behind,” said Patrick D. Owens, shareholder at Buchalter and a member of the law firm’s tax, benefits and estate planning practice group.
Absent language about digital assets, your heirs might have to go to court to get the authority for the executor or administrator of the estate to gain access to the crypto assets. Most likely they’ll get access, “but it’s a hassle,” Owens said. “Obviously, it means time and money going into court.”
Even with a will, crypto assets can get stuck in court
A standard will is appropriate for many people, but many attorneys recommend clients also utilize a revocable living trust as part of their estate plan. Drafting a will is less expensive, but a revocable living trust offers more privacy and can help limit the time and expense of the probate process after death.
Baer advises clients to transfer their crypto to a revocable living trust so the trustee has immediate access upon the owner’s death. It could be six to eight months, or more, before a will is settled in probate and in the meantime, heirs wouldn’t have access to the assets. If the price of the crypto was going down rapidly, for example, they would have to wait to sell it if the estate was caught up in probate. Putting crypto assets into a revocable trust to avoid probate can prevent a lot of headaches, he said.
Generally, a revocable trust is paired with a pour-over will so that assets not included in the trust at the time of a person’s death are transferred to the trust and distributed accordingly.
Not sharing basic crypto information can cost millions
You don’t have to tell heirs you’re worth a fortune in bitcoin before you pass away, but you should make sure they know how to access your crypto after you’re gone.
Baer worked on an estate where tens of millions of dollars in crypto were lost to the heirs because they didn’t know the decedent’s private keys, which function as digital passwords to grant access to cryptocurrency funds and prove ownership of blockchain assets.
Someone should know how to access the assets, whether through written instructions in a safe box, a safe at home, or directions kept with a lawyer or with one of the various crypto inheritance services that help ensure crypto assets are passed on to your family members, Baer said. Don’t put these private keys or other sensitive information in a will, because wills become public through the probate process, he added.
Many designated fiduciaries can’t handle crypto
The person you chose to handle your other assets may not be the right person to deal with the crypto portion of your estate.
Not everyone understands crypto, the associated volatility or how to transact with digital currency, meaning lots of money can inadvertently be lost. The recent volatility in the price of bitcoin is a reminder that if you name someone who needs weeks to get up to speed on how to transact with bitcoin, the financial losses could be meaningful, Baer said. “Uncle Bob may be a great person, but he may have more challenges transacting with an asset class he’s totally not familiar with,” he added.
Sometimes, even institutional trustees might not be able to take on the responsibility for crypto. Owens had a client pass away with half a million dollars in bitcoin and ether. The institutional trustee who oversaw the client’s account refused to take on the responsibility for the crypto and a special trustee was named. Luckily, the client had a nephew who took on the role, but finding a suitable replacement can often be costly from a time and money perspective, Owens said.
Failure to plan for crypto estate taxes
With the massive explosion in the values around cryptocurrency, many people have large crypto holdings, which could be subject to significant taxes, whether that’s income taxes or estate taxes, and failure to plan could be detrimental to their families, said Jonathan Forster, shareholder at law firm Weinstock Manion.
There could, for example, be estate taxes due, depending on the size of the estate. The federal estate tax exemption for 2025 is $13.99 million per individual. Some states also have a state-level estate tax.
Knowing the impact crypto ownership might have on your estate is an important consideration while you are alive. Forster has clients whose crypto holdings are worth more than $50 million. They wanted an efficient way to make gifts for the benefit of their children to get some money out of their estate. They created a limited liability corporation, transferred the crypto into the LLC and gifted an interest in the LLC to an irrevocable trust for the benefit of minor children with an independent trustee, Forster said.
Many crypto investors fail to keep track of cost basis, which can be problematic for many reasons, including if you’re considering gifting digital assets during your lifetime. If you want to gift the assets while you’re alive, you need to have the basis so the recipient can properly account for the crypto if it’s eventually sold, Baer said. “It can be onerous to keep track of basis, but it’s important,” he said.
The U.S. has banned the export of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which are considered the company’s most advanced offerings, to China in an effort to stay ahead in the AI race.
DeepSeek is reportedly using chips that were snuck into the country without authorization, according to The Information.
“We haven’t seen any substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom datacenters’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement. “While such smuggling seems farfetched, we pursue any tip we receive.”
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Nvidia has been one of the biggest winners of the AI boom so far because it develops the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are key for training models and running large workloads.
Since the hardware is so crucial for advancing AI technology, Nvidia’s relationship with China has become a political flashpoint among U.S. lawmakers.
President Donald Trump on Monday said Nvidia can ship its H200 chips to “approved customers” in China and elsewhere on the condition that the U.S. will get 25% of those sales.
The announcement was met with pushback from some Republicans.
DeepSeek spooked the U.S. tech sector in January when it released a reasoning model, called R1, that rocketed to the top of app stores and industry leaderboards. R1 was also created at a fraction of the cost of other models in the U.S., according to some analyst estimates.
In August, DeepSeek hinted that China will soon have its own “next generation” chips to support its AI models.
The Starcloud-1 satellite is launched into space from a SpaceX rocket on November 2, 2025.
Courtesy: SpaceX | Starcloud
Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud trained an artificial intelligence model from space for the first time, signaling a new era for orbital data centers that could alleviate Earth’s escalating digital infrastructure crisis.
Last month, the Washington-based company launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, sending a chip into outer space that’s 100 times more powerful than any GPU compute that has been in space before. Now, the company’s Starcloud-1 satellite is running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google, in orbit, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been has run on a high-powered Nvidia GPU in outer space, CNBC has learned.
“Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you — a fascinating collection of blue and green,” reads a message from the recently launched satellite. “Let’s see what wonders this view of your world holds. I’m Gemma, and I’m here to observe, analyze, and perhaps, occasionally offer a slightly unsettlingly insightful commentary. Let’s begin!” the model wrote.
Starcloud’s output Gemma in space. Gemma is a family of open models built from the same technology used to create Google’s Gemini AI models.
Starcloud
Starcloud wants to show outer space can be a hospitable environment for data centers, particularly as Earth-based facilities strain power grids, consume billions of gallons of water annually and produce hefty greenhouse gas emissions. The electricity consumption of data centers is projected to more than double by 2030, according to data from the International Energy Agency.
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company’s orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers.
“Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially,” Johnston said in an interview.
Johnston, who co-founded the startup in 2024, said Starcloud-1’s operation of Gemma is proof that space-based data centers can exist and operate a variety of AI models in the future, particularly those that require large compute clusters.
“This very powerful, very parameter dense model is living on our satellite,” Johnston said. “We can query, it and it will respond in the same way that when you query a chat from a database on Earth, it will give you a very sophisticated response. We can do that with our satellite.”
In a statement to CNBC, Google DeepMind product director Tris Warkentin said that “seeing Gemma run in the harsh environment of space is a testament to the flexibility and robustness of open models.”
In addition to Gemma, Starcloud was able to train NanoGPT, an LLM created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, on the H100 chip using the complete works of Shakespeare. This led the model to speak in Shakespearean English.
Starcloud — a member of the Nvidia Inception program and graduate from Y Combinator and the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator — plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar and cooling panels that measure roughly 4 kilometers in both width and height. A compute cluster of that gigawatt size would produce more power than the largest power plant in the U.S. and would be substantially smaller and cheaper than a terrestrial solar farm of the same capacity, according to Starcloud’s white paper.
These data centers in space would capture constant solar energy to power next-generation AI models, unhindered by the Earth’s day and night cycles and weather changes. Starcloud’s satellites should have a five-year lifespan given the expected lifetime of the Nvidia chips on its architecture, Johnston said.
Orbital data centers would have real-world commercial and military use cases. Already, Starcloud’s systems can enable real-time intelligence and, for example, spot the thermal signature of a wildfire the moment it ignites and immediately alert first responders, Johnston said.
“We’ve linked in the telemetry of the satellite, so we linked in the vital signs that it’s drawing from the sensors — things like altitude, orientation, location, speed,” Johnston said. “You can ask it, ‘Where are you now?’ and it will say ‘I’m above Africa and in 20 minutes, I’ll be above the Middle East.’ And you could also say, ‘What does it feel like to be a satellite? And it will say, ‘It’s kind of a bit weird’ … It’ll give you an interesting answer that you could only have with a very high-powered model.”
Starcloud is working on customer workloads by running inference on satellite imagery from observation company Capella Space, which could help spot lifeboats from capsized vessels at sea and forest fires in a certain location. The company will include several Nvidia H100 chips and integrate Nvidia’s Blackwell platform onto its next satellite launch in October 2026 to offer greater AI performance. The satellite launching next year will feature a module running a cloud platform from cloud infrastructure startup Crusoe, allowing customers to deploy and operate AI workloads from space.
“Running advanced AI from space solves the critical bottlenecks facing data centers on Earth,” Johnston told CNBC.
“Orbital compute offers a way forward that respects both technological ambition and environmental responsibility. When Starcloud-1 looked down, it saw a world of blue and green. Our responsibility is to keep it that way,” he added.
The risks
Risks in operating orbital data centers remain, however. Analysts from Morgan Stanley have noted that orbital data centers could face hurdles such as harsh radiation, difficulty of in-orbit maintenance, debris hazards and regulatory issues tied to data governance and space traffic.
Still, tech giants are pursuing orbital data centers given the prospect of nearly limitless solar energy and greater, gigawatt-sized operations in space.
Along with Starcloud and Nvidia’s efforts, several companies have announced space-based data center missions. On Nov. 4, Google unveiled a “moonshot” initiative titled Project Suncatcher, which aims to put solar-powered satellites into space with Google’s tensor processing units. Privately-owned Lonestar Data Holdings is working to put the first-ever commercial lunar data center on the moon’s surface.
Referring to Starcloud’s launch in early November, Nvidia senior director of AI infrastructure Dion Harris said: “From one small data center, we’ve taken a giant leap toward a future where orbital computing harnesses the infinite power of the sun.”
Investors are betting there’s room for another startup using artificial intelligence to help software engineers write code faster. The difference with Kilo Code is it counts former GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij among its founders.
On Wednesday, Kilo Code announced $8 million in seed funding, with backing from Breakers, Cota Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital and Tokyo Black.
Sijbrandij is a self-taught developer who helped popularize GitLab’s tools for source code collaboration, deployment and testing. GitLab went public in 2021 and is valued at more than $6 billion. Sijbrandij stepped down as CEO last year to focus on cancer treatment but continued as board chair.
Since then, the technology industry has become obsessed with having large language models write and update software, a practice commonly known in Silicon Valley as vibe coding.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy is credited with coining the term in February. OpenAI looked at buying AI coding startup Windsurf for around $3 billion, but scrapped the plan before Google hired senior Windsurf employees in a $2.4 billion transaction in July. Rival Cursor announced a $2.3 billion funding round in November at a $29.3 billion valuation.
Sijbrandij witnessed the action and became fascinated by what AI could do for software development. In September, an acquaintance introduced him to Scott Breitenother, who started and later sold consultancy Brooklyn Data.
“I thought we were just kind of having a meet and greet, and then 25 minutes in, Sid’s like, ‘Hey, can you start next week?'” Breitenother said.
Sijbrandij contributed early capital for the startup, which now employs about 34 people across continents. Breitenother is in charge, but he talks with Sijbrandij many times a day.
Kilo Code’s software plugs in to coding applications such as Cursor and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. It’s the most widely used service for startup OpenRouter’s application programming interface that gives developers access to a variety of AI models, including Grok Code Fast 1 from Elon Musk’s xAI. Kilo Code has processed more than 3 trillion tokens in the past month, according to OpenRouter. A single token represents about three-quarters of a word.
Daniël Langezaal, a software engineer at Dutch e-commerce startup Plug&Pay, said he has used Kilo Code for months after trying products from Anthropic, Cursor and Microsoft, among others. He said he appreciates Kilo Code’s support for both premium and affordable models, and he likes that people publicly contribute to the Kilo Code extension under an open-source license.
Langezaal has spread the word. About 80% of Plug&Pay’s developers now use Kilo Code, he said. It helped save time for one teammate who recently assembled a complex SQL query.
“With Kilo, it took him a day,” Langezaal said. “If he didn’t have access to Kilo, it would have taken him a few days to implement.”
GitLab, which has been testing a platform for AI agents to perform tasks, is paying attention, and was interested in what Kilo was building.
“I talked to the board,” Sijbrandij said. “We ended up deciding to do it outside of GitLab.”
GitLab included reference to Kilo in a filing last month. The company said that it paid Kilo $1,000 in exchange for a right of first refusal for 10 business days should the startup receive an acquisition proposal before August 2026.
The market is rapidly evolving. Design software company Figma and a slew of startups now offer vibe coding options for less technical people. It’s a category Kilo Code won’t be ignoring for much longer.
“We also want to be the place for people just getting started with code,” Sijbrandij said. “We are working on an app builder that’s more like the Lovable or Bolt experience,” he said, referring to two popular startups.
