There is a need to more easily handle a contract upon a user’s death. Probate, even as an only child: can be difficult. In the U.S.: an estate can be held up for years, and there are plenty of stories where someone with millions of crypto passed without their family to take it over.
I would think then there would be a need to take public records, like death certificates, and place them on a blockchain to where these then can also be used to trigger an event in a contract that could then shift ownership to a beneficiary. There would need to be dapps that could take data from the CDC for the U.S. and other available public records and place them onto a chain, and then support code for handling the events, and should be done open source but with dedicated support to ensure the project’s longevity.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? Privacy is an obvious concern, as well as needing to correlate data from enough sources to actually confirm someone’s death, or other data that is of public record. I would certainly love to be part of this development team!
As far as the United States, the CDC provides publicly facing stats for mortality:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstatsonline.htm#Mortality_Multiple
…with the data including:
Names of the states in which those deaths occurred
Dates of death
Corresponding death certificate numbers
Cause(s) of death, if using the NDI Plus service
There then needs to be correlation between this data, and Obituary data (such as that found at https://www.legacy.com/ but this website would just be used, perhaps, as a model for a more inclusive service within these sets of applications that support the public and private records on the blockchain).
Other typical means of determining if someone has died or not can be applied as well such as social media scrapes (sources such as Facebook’s memorial page). Form submission by family members that could trigger more thorough human investigations. Searching for a gravesite. Other methods needing researched.
A small group of data analysts and entry specialists would be needed to keep all of the data organized, but the economic benefit should be great in terms of the ability to recover lost crypto. 
Thank you for the link, useful to know about for probably a variety of purposes, and welcome to the forum… my apologies on all our behalf if that welcome has somehow been missed so far.
I’m sure there will be more than one project which uses Cardano to gather information on people’s vital statistics non-consensually. Certainly if deaths can be validated through such projects, people will find all kinds of reasons and methods to establish their own deaths there… probably multiple times. 
Again, my apologies if you have already been sent here while waiting for a response to your first posting, but I think you would find it interesting to learn all you can about this project, which is already being coupled with some well-developed Cardano projects making use of consensually provided real world identities:
https://www.atalaprism.io/
p.s. an example project using Atala (launching to public sale investors now):
I have not researched WMT and Atala yet, and it seems very promising! Thank you for the link, and the welcome!
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