Here is a question that sounds like science fiction but is really a problem in property law: when you are revived, what will you live on? Suppose the whole improbable chain works. The standby team reaches you in time, the perfusion is even, the glass holds for a century, and some future medicine reads your preserved structure back into a working person. You wake up. You are, on paper, a newborn with the memories of an adult. You own nothing. Everything you had was distributed the day you were declared dead, because that is what the law does with the property of the dead.
This is one of the genuinely open problems in the field, and it deserves to be treated as open rather than waved away. The core tension is simple and stubborn: at legal death you stop being a legal owner, yet the person who might one day need those resources is, in every way that matters to you now, still going to be you. The question is whether value can be carried across a gap that the law treats as the end of you. Nobody has a clean answer. What we have is a set of partial strategies, each with a real failure mode.
The custody problem: value has to outlive its owner
Strip the romance away and you are left with a custody problem. You need some structure that can hold value while you cannot, for decades or centuries, and then hand it back to a person the law does not currently recognize as the original owner. That is unusual but not unprecedented. Foundations hold endowments for purposes, not people. Trusts hold assets for beneficiaries who may not even be born yet. The machinery for separating ownership from control already exists; the hard part is pointing it at a beneficiary who is legally dead today and hypothetically alive much later.
The same institutional durability that makes provider stability a real concern applies here in a second form. It is not enough for your body to survive a century. The financial vehicle attached to it has to survive the same century, through inflation, regime change, and the ordinary entropy that dissolves most institutions long before a hundred years are out.
The discretionary trust: fund the preservation, invest the remainder
The most concrete proposal on the table is a trust, and Rafael Hostettler sketched a version of it in a Biostasis2021 talk that is worth knowing about at a high level. The idea is a discretionary or revival trust. You fund it, and it does two jobs in sequence. First it pays for your preservation and ongoing storage, which is the part you would have arranged anyway through life insurance or other funding methods. Then it invests whatever remains, with instructions that the accumulated value be made available to you, or to a future-you the trust is built to recognize, if and when revival happens.
The appeal is that a well-run trust can compound for a very long time, and a small sum left to grow for a century can become a large one. The vulnerabilities are equally real. Trusts have trustees, and trustees are human institutions that can be captured, can drift from their mandate, or can simply dissolve. Many jurisdictions limit how long a trust can run before it must distribute. And a trust written today has to anticipate a beneficiary the current legal system does not believe will ever exist. None of that is fatal, but all of it is unsolved engineering.
Divide and conquer, and don't trust one basket
If no single vehicle is robust, the rational move is the one you would make with any high-uncertainty bet: diversify the failure modes. One sensible split sends part of your resources to a durable non-profit aligned with your survival, the way long-term storage itself rests on the non-profit European Biostasis Foundation rather than on any one company. That part is not really your money anymore; it buys the survival of the system you depend on. The other part goes into a self-replicating or self-perpetuating trust whose job is purely to carry value forward to the revived person.
You can push the diversification further into the physical world. Stores of value that do not depend on any single institution remaining solvent, things that are scarce and durable across centuries, are an old hedge against exactly this kind of long-horizon risk. The point is not to find one perfect answer. It is to make sure that no single bankruptcy, expropriation, or legal reinterpretation can zero out everything at once. The same expected-value reasoning that justifies preservation in the first place applies to the money behind it: spread the bet so that a partial failure is survivable.
The case that none of this matters
Now the argument against the whole exercise, because honesty requires it. There is a real possibility that preserving wealth is solving a problem the future will not have. The same conditions that make revival plausible, mature molecular engineering, automation, abundant energy, point toward a world of radical material abundance. In a genuinely post-scarcity society, the cost of housing, feeding, and re-educating one revived person might be trivial, the way the cost of a glass of water is trivial today. If the future that can revive you is also a future where money is close to irrelevant, then a trust grinding away for a century to hand you a fortune is a quaint anachronism, like leaving your descendants a chest of gold doubloons.
This is speculative, and it cuts both ways. A future advanced enough to revive you might be post-scarcity, or it might be a place where a person with no assets and no legal standing is profoundly vulnerable. We do not know which, which is itself the argument for a modest, diversified hedge rather than either complacency or an elaborate fortune. Note also that revival is currently not possible at all, so every plan here is conditional on a step that has not yet been demonstrated.
You can preserve a body with physics today, but preserving wealth across legal death is an unsolved problem in law and institutions, best met with diversification and humility rather than a single clever scheme.
The honest summary is that this is one of the parts of biostasis where the science is further along than the surrounding machinery. We can vitrify tissue and hold it at -196°C with confidence. We cannot yet promise that the resources you set aside will find their way to the person who wakes up. If that bothers you, good. It is the kind of problem that gets solved by people who take it seriously, and treating it as open is the first step toward closing it.