1. The purpose of secure digital vaults
People these days have complex assets – bank accounts, life insurances, retirement plans, company stocks, stock options, RSUs, to name a few.
In addition to these assets, many of which are digital, people have more and more documents that need to be stored, accessed, and organized – passports, health records, copies of policies, passwords, digital keys, etc.
Secure digital vaults were created to serve that specific need – to store and organize confidential information about assets and documents. In addition to storing, these vaults have the inherent capability of making the information accessible from anywhere, as they are online. You can get a copy of your passport during your business trip, details about your health insurance while you are on vacation, or information about your bank account keys.
To fulfil that need, digital vaults have a few very distinctive characteristics
- they have a very high level of security.
This is required because of the sensitive and confidential data stored in them
- they are online.
The primary goal of the vaults is to be accessible from anywhere
– their access is strictly restricted to the owners.
While they are accessible from anywhere, access to them is granted solely to the owners.
Digital vaults are very similar to banks: they store confidential information, they are very secure, and access to them is granted to the owners but is almost impossible to be granted to other people, including family members.
2. Types of vaults
While most secure digital vaults serve similar purposes, there are some slight differences between some of them.
The majority of these vaults aim to store records of confidential information, such as copies of important documents. These types of vaults offer additional features, for example easier organization of the records through their classification into categories.
Another evolutionary direction of digital vaults is as password managers. These vaults are designed to serve a niche need of storing passwords for various digital and non-digital applications such as email accounts, social profiles, and bank accounts. These types of vaults often offer additional features such as automatic integration with external systems, which enables the owner of the vault account to automatically supply the password to external systems through the vault, instead of remembering or obtaining manually the individual passwords for each of the external systems.
3. Where secure vaults fall short
While secure digital vaults serve their purpose of storing confidential records and making them accessible to the vault account owner from anywhere, there is one area where these vaults fall short. It is the area of so-called digital inheritance. Put simply, this means making the vault account records accessible to family members or other beneficiaries should anything happen to the account owner.
The reason why vaults don’t serve that purpose well lies in their inherent design to restrict access to anyone but the account owner. That characteristic is at the heart of the very nature of vaults, and adding digital inheritance capability to such a system is not a trivial task.
That’s becoming a growing problem for vault account owners, as they want to not only securely store and access their digital records but also ensure that their family members will get access to them should anything happen to the vault account owner.
4. How does DGLegacy provide digital inheritance?
DGLegacy aims to fill that gap and fulfil the goal of digital inheritance in several ways, which are very distinctive from how secure vaults function.
First, DGLegacy enables people to designate beneficiaries for their assets. This is not an additional feature or perk at DGLegacy – it’s part of its core design.
Second, the application has a custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol which detects unforeseen events happening to the user. Upon detection of such an event, the information about the assets is provided to the beneficiaries to whom the assets have been assigned. This mechanism is at the core of DGLegacy, specifically designed to fulfil the goal of inheritance of assets in the digital world.
The primary difference between existing secure vaults and DGLegacy is that the latter is created with the intention of being a digital inheritance vehicle for complex assets, not merely a secure vault.
- With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your assets against unforeseen events and ensure that your family is secure. You can connect your preferred beneficiary with your preferred assets, and they will be notified at the time you choose – while ensuring they get the support they need in the process of claiming.
- With DGLegacy, you can protect all types of assets. It is also easy to keep your list of assets and beneficiaries up to date.
This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:
- are aware of your assets
- can identify and locate your assets
- can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.
5. Then are digital vaults dead?
Absolutely not. In the modern digital world, they will play an even bigger role. But this role is not related to digital inheritance. It is rather related to secure storage of confidential information, primarily available to the owner of the vault. Their purpose is to help the busy individual organize their life, by providing easy and secure access to their digital records such as bank account access information, passwords, health records, and passports.
On the other hand, the purpose of DGLegacy is to provide a secure digital inheritance tool for asset protection, ensuring that in the case of an unforeseen event, your family will be protected. They will be aware of your assets and know where to locate them and how to claim them.
