Dividing up the money during a divorce can already get messy, and now, thanks to cryptocurrency assets, it can get even messier.
Alphonse Provinziano, managing partner of Provinziano & Associates in Beverly Hills, California, practices divorce and family law. He says he’s already seeing a spike in cases in which one spouse has crypto assets and the other is trying to hunt down the information about them.
According to him, some battling exes who have accumulated crypto wealth may be reluctant to share the details of their assets in the hopes of keeping all of it to themselves.
Crypto “is going to be a growing challenge because it’s a popular asset, particularly for millennials,” Provinziano says. Divorce lawyers “need to start understanding the way crypto is bought and sold.” About 30% of adults in the U.S. own crypto, according to the 2026 CryptoCurrency Adoption and Sentiment Report. Individuals in the U.S. between 30 and 44 make up the largest age group to own crypto, at 23.5 million.
Cryptocurrencies move directly between users over blockchain networks, allowing them to bypass traditional banks. Crypto wallets store passkeys for transactions.
Some states are starting to modernize how crypto assets are handled during divorce proceedings. In New York, divorce litigants must file statements of net worth that have been updated with a dedicated section for cryptocurrency, along with prompts intended to elicit specificity about the assets.
Jennifer A. Brandt is chair of the family law group at Cozen O’Connor in Philadelphia, where she represents people in divorce, custody and child support disputes. She says it’s important for lawyers to discuss the wide range of possible assets with their clients, as well as update discovery requests to be designed to elicit information about crypto, such as details about digital wallets.
“The most important thing is to be asking the right questions,” says Brandt, the immediate past chair of the American Bar Association Section of Family Law.
Another challenge is determining how much a crypto asset is worth because valuation can vary without traditional anchors like corporate earnings, she says.
And there’s little court precedent on dividing crypto in the fairest way possible, and it might take some time for the legal system to catch up, according to Brandt.
Dabblers and distrusters
Karen M. Platt is a partner specializing in divorce litigation and asset distribution in the New York office of Pryor Cashman. She says an important first step in examining crypto assets is better understanding the nature of the individuals holding them.
Platt says there are two types of people who invest in crypto: Dabblers and distrusters.
The less complicated type, she says, is the “dabbler,” who has included some crypto in their portfolio “because it’s cool, or they want to know more about it, or they want their friends to know they have it.”
Dabblers, she says, tend to have more easily traceable assets and are more likely to produce evidence of the assets when requested.
Parties who dabble in crypto tend to have easily traceable assets, but “distrusters” are a different story, Karen M. Platt says.
Distrusters, Platt says, tend to like crypto because “they don’t trust the banks or the government or, often, their partner.”
With distrusters, she says, it’s more likely there’s money that has “been transferred and disappeared.” A distruster can have “hundreds of thousands of dollars” hidden, and often “there’s some kind of shenanigans going on.” It’s more likely that a forensic accountant will be necessary to help track the assets of a distruster, she says.
“It can be important to have an expert involved to make sure that you are digging in,” says Platt, chair-elect of the ABA Family Law Section.
‘Very, very, very costly’
Victoria Fife is a forensic accountant and digital assets expert at CBIZ in Los Angeles, where she specializes in complex tracing, valuation and the division of assets in divorce and civil litigation.
Fife says lawyers need to examine whether their clients have invested in crypto assets, and if so, ensure these clients are properly disclosing that information and whether there has been any “significant” change in those assets’ value.
If lawyers know their clients or the opposing parties have any “meaningful amount of cryptocurrency,” it’s a good idea to have an expert in crypto, such as a forensic accountant, on standby to help with disputes that may arise suddenly in litigation, she says.
But she also warns that forensic accountants, particularly when hired to trace the whereabouts of an opposing party’s crypto, can end up being “very, very, very costly.”
Fife says that cases can also end up with “big surprises and higher fees.”
If lawyers believe that the crypto assets are worth less than $100,000, they might want to “consider a settlement option because the fees could end up close to that amount,” she explains.
