A senior law firm executive has highlighted access and storage as the most fundamental issues that need addressing and satisfying if an SMSF trustee is interested in making an allocation to cryptocurrency within their fund’s investment portfolio.
“For any crypto hodling SMSF clients ask yourselves can their crypto-assets be located, accessed and accounted for. [You also should establish whether] successor trustees or directors of a trustee company have the legal right and practical means to control or recover those crypto-assets,” WMM Law director Kimberly Martin told delegates at the SMSF Association Technical Summit 2025 held in Sydney recently.
Martin pointed out the concept of access to cryptocurrency holdings extends to avenues of user authentication as well.
“What about [access to] relevant email accounts, mobile phones and other devices where important asset information might be stored or utilised as part of two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication,” she noted.
To this end, she pointed out how intricate and complicated situations may become for advisers having to deal with these matters.
“If the only way we can access those access credentials are through biometrics, who’s going to put up their hand to go to the funeral home to get the fingerprint [in the event the member with crypto-assets has passed away] or the retina scan?” she said.
“Those things have happened and it is incredibly difficult if that is the mechanism being used to access a person’s crypto to store their private keys.”
According to Martin, reliance on personal devices with regard to the storage of SMSF crypto-assets is less than ideal.
“What happens if a trustee or director dies or loses capacity without an effective access plan or the access plan is tied solely to a personal device? We absolutely don’t want that for self-managed super fund trustees because any crypto holdings that we have should absolutely be stored separately to a personal device,” she warned.
