Research on Decentralized Digital Inheritance Management System Empowered by Blockchain and Smart Contracts: With a Discussion on the Inheritance and Destruction of Digital Assets

With the rapid development of the digital economy, the types and value of digital assets are increasing daily, making their inheritance and destruction an urgent legal and technical problem to be solved. The lag of traditional legal frameworks in this field has led to a "digital inheritance vacuum." This paper deeply explores the application potential of blockchain and smart contract technology in constructing a decentralized digital inheritance management system. Firstly, it analyzes the practical needs and research significance of digital asset inheritance and destruction, and reviews the current status and challenges of relevant legal frameworks domestically and internationally. Secondly, it elaborates on the inherent advantages of blockchain technology in the implementation of digital wills and evaluates the applicability of different blockchain platforms. The core functional design of smart contracts in digital wills is a key research focus, including liveness detection, multi-signature, conditional execution, and innovative asset classification processing and destruction strategies, with a special discussion on the feasibility and research direction of introducing Artificial Intelligence Agents (AI Agents) to assist in complex destruction tasks. Furthermore, a decentralized digital inheritance management DApp architecture is proposed, including a blockchain underlying layer, a middleware layer (containing oracles, encryption and key management, DID systems), and an application layer. The paper analyzes the key technical challenges faced by this system, such as private key management, data privacy, oracle problems, cross-chain interoperability, and legal regulatory conflicts, and proposes corresponding solutions. Finally, it discusses ways to ensure the legal validity of blockchain-based digital wills, provides suggestions for China's implementation path in this field by combining international practical cases, and looks forward to future development trends. This research aims to provide a theoretical basis and practical reference for building a secure, transparent, efficient, and automated digital inheritance management system.