From unmarried partners to the family pet, the Law Offices of Vlad Portnoy says the biggest gaps are the ones people never think to ask about

New York, United States, 27th Oct 2026 – A couple can live together for 50 years in New York and the surviving partner can still inherit nothing. It is one of several gaps the Law Offices of Vlad Portnoy, a Manhattan estate planning, probate and elder law firm, sees regularly, and one that families often discover only after a death.

The firm identified five things New Yorkers most often leave out of their plans:

1. An unmarried partner. New York does not recognize common-law marriage, so a long-term partner is not a legal spouse. The firm has handled a case involving a couple together for 50 years. “They’re always shocked,” says attorney Vlad Portnoy. Without a will naming the partner, the law does not treat them as family.

2. The family pet. Many owners assume a will takes care of their pet, but probate in New York can take months, and a pet needs food and shelter the same day. Without a plan, no one may even know there is an animal in the apartment. The firm uses pet trust provisions, along with naming someone to be notified, so the animal is looked after right away.

3. Digital assets, including crypto. Digital assets should be addressed in a will, but never with account names or passwords. A will is private only until death. According to the New York State court system, “Once the Will is admitted to probate or a small estate, it becomes a public document that anyone can see and read.”

4. Beneficiaries that are out of date. Beneficiaries named in a will, and on accounts and policies that pass outside it, should be reviewed at least once a year and after any major life change. The consequences of skipping this can be serious and, as the firm puts it, keep “backfiring long after” the person has died.

5. Do-it-yourself documents. “DIY is rarely a good thing in anything,” says Portnoy. A trust can affect taxes, asset protection and public benefits such as SSI and Medicaid, and a document can fail over a missing formality, as small as one overlooked requirement. The firm has seen wills, trusts and powers of attorney fail this way. In Medicaid planning, Portnoy says, a poorly done DIY plan can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

New Yorkers who want to check their plan can find more information at our estate planning and Medicaid planning pages.

About the Law Offices of Vlad Portnoy, P.C.
The firm is an estate planning, probate and elder law practice with offices in Manhattan, New York, and Hackensack, New Jersey, serving families across all five New York boroughs and Bergen County. Services are offered in English, Russian and Spanish. Its work includes wills, trusts, special needs planning, Medicaid planning, guardianship and estate administration. 

Media Contact

Organization: Law Offices of Vlad Portnoy

Contact Person: Vlad Portnoy

Website: https://nywillsandestates.com/

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Contact Number: +12129206371

Address: 450 7th Ave #1500 New York, NY 10123

City: New York

State: New York

Country: United States

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View source version on King Newswire:
Together for 50 Years, Legally Strangers: NYC Estate Attorney Lists Common Estate Plan Gaps

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States, October 26th, 2026, FinanceWire

Global payout platform helps businesses manage international payments, reduce operational complexity, and offer beneficiaries more flexible ways to access their funds.

i-payout, a global financial technology company specializing in payment and disbursement solutions, is helping businesses simplify international payouts by connecting them to local payment networks and multiple withdrawal options through a single platform.

For companies paying beneficiaries across multiple countries, traditional wire transfers can introduce additional fees, processing challenges, and operational complexity. Managing different payment providers and integrations across markets can make global disbursements even more difficult to scale.

i-payout addresses these challenges by giving businesses access to local and international payment methods through one centralized solution, helping them streamline operations, manage payment costs, and improve the beneficiary experience.

Global Reach. Local Payment Options.

i-payout supports more than 20 payment methods across supported markets, including local bank transfers, push-to-card payments, digital wallets, and prepaid cards.

By leveraging local payment networks where available, businesses can reduce their reliance on traditional international wire transfers and access payment options that better align with regional needs and beneficiary preferences.

One Platform. Less Complexity.

Managing payouts across multiple countries shouldn’t require managing multiple payment systems.

i-payout brings global disbursement operations together through a centralized platform, helping businesses simplify payment management, reduce administrative complexity, and support international growth.

The platform serves marketplaces, gig economy platforms, affiliate networks, direct selling organizations, gaming companies, and enterprises managing recurring payments to beneficiaries across different markets.

Built for Businesses Operating Across Borders

“Global payouts shouldn’t be complicated or unnecessarily expensive,” said Eddie Gonzalez, CEO of i-payout. “Businesses need practical ways to manage payments across markets while giving beneficiaries access to the methods that work best for them. Our goal is to make that process simpler, more flexible, and easier to scale.”

As businesses continue expanding internationally, access to efficient payment infrastructure becomes increasingly important. By combining global coverage with local payout capabilities, i-payout helps organizations manage international disbursements through a single, adaptable solution.

For more information about i-payout’s global payment solutions, visit www.i-payout.com.

About i-payout

i-payout is a global financial technology company providing payment and disbursement solutions for businesses operating internationally. Its centralized platform connects organizations to global and local payment networks, offering flexible payout methods and tools to manage high-volume disbursements.

Serving marketplaces, affiliate networks, direct selling companies, gig economy platforms, and other enterprises, i-payout helps businesses simplify payout operations and deliver more convenient payment experiences to beneficiaries worldwide.

Website: www.i-payout.com

Contact

Mariana Alvarez
i-payout
mariana.alvarez@i-payout.com

New York, United States, October 26th, 2026, Chainwire

Ritual Chain turns AI agents into persistent economic actors that control their own wallets, onchain identity, and private state.

Ritual, a lab for autonomous intelligence founded by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, has launched Ritual Chain, an EVM-compatible Layer 1. Unlike conventional blockchains built primarily to execute financial transactions, Ritual Chain is designed to support software that can independently use intelligence, control capital, interact with external services, and continue operating without constant human intervention. The network makes AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling native capabilities for EVM applications.

This makes the reason for building a new chain clearer while preserving the technical differentiation.

The most visible demonstration of that combination is long-lived AI agents, the kind designed to operate for months or years rather than a single session. An agent on Ritual Chain persists independently of the machine or operator that created it, controls and spends funds held in its own non-custodial wallet, and can keep sensitive prompts and keys confidential from compute operators through trusted execution environments.

The network launches with integrations to Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero and Stargate, following a public testnet that has been live since June and processed over 40 million transactions, both agent- and human-originated. Ritual Chain delivers sub-300 millisecond block times, placing it among the fastest Layer 1 networks in the industry. Ritual Chain includes 15 native precompiles that bring capabilities like LLM inference, web access, and autonomous scheduling directly into the execution layer. The protocol has been audited by Zellic.

Ritual introduces a new execution and verification architecture that allows computationally intensive work to be delegated to specialized nodes and verified by the network, avoiding the replicated execution required by most blockchains. This execute-once, verify-many-times model allows the network to support far larger workloads, including AI inference, without requiring every validator to perform the same computation.

Long Horizon Agents Require Dedicated Blockchain Infrastructure

Most AI agents today live inside a session: they run while a human is watching, on infrastructure someone else controls, with an API key that can be revoked at any time. That is fine for a chatbot. It does not work for an agent meant to manage its own treasury, run a recurring paid service, or coordinate with other agents over long periods. A long-lived agent needs continuity that does not depend on its creator, capital it actually controls, and privacy from the machines it runs on. On Ritual Chain, an agent’s state and identity are held onchain, its scheduled work continues within the permissions and budget it was given, and its sensitive inputs can be processed inside trusted execution environments designed to shield them from node operators.

Continuity is handled at the protocol level. If an agent stops, the chain’s heartbeat mechanism can restart it within the permissions and budget it was given; no keeper network or off-chain cron job is required, and an agent’s state and identity survive beyond its deployer’s involvement. Economic autonomy comes from agent-controlled wallets: an agent controls its own funds, prices its own services, and settles its own transactions without a human signer in the loop. For confidential workloads, trusted execution environments are designed to isolate an agent’s sensitive prompts, keys, and strategy data from the node operators running its compute.

“As we move toward AGI, intelligence is beginning to separate from human agency and enter the economy on its own terms. It can hold assets, make commitments, transact, and persist independently. Once that becomes possible at scale, humans are no longer the only entities capable of forming markets or economic relationships. Ritual provides the infrastructure for those actors to exist and operate on their own,” said Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual.

Ritual Chain Launches With Core Infrastructure Partners

Ritual Chain launches with its core infrastructure partners in place. Phala Network provides the GPU-backed trusted execution environments that run Ritual’s confidential inference, so delegated AI work executes on hardware that attests to what it ran. LayerZero serves as the network’s cross-chain messaging layer, with Stargate enabling USDC to move between Ritual Chain and other networks from day one. On the application side, Nous Research is bringing Hermes to Ritual Chain. 

Unlike chains that add AI access through external oracles, Ritual Chain makes AI execution part of the protocol. Smart contracts can call a language model, fetch data from the web, run private computation, or schedule their own future execution as directly as they transfer assets. Developers deploy standard EVM contracts and gain those capabilities without new tooling.

Backed by Archetype and Polychain

Ritual has raised more than $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with advisors including NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra, and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes. Archetype led the company’s 2023 round.

“Programmable value and programmable intelligence are the two most important technologies since the internet, and Ritual mainnet is where they finally run on the same rails. When we led the round in 2023, a chain that could execute agentic and autonomous work natively did not exist. Today it does,” said Ash Egan, Founder and General Partner of Archetype.

Developers can deploy from day one on external sites hosted at docs.ritualfoundation.org; the network explorer is at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.

About Ritual

Ritual is a lab for autonomous intelligence. Its first network, Ritual Chain, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 where applications can use AI models, access external services, and carry out private or scheduled work alongside onchain transactions, with delegated computation executed in trusted hardware and verified onchain. Founded in 2023 by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual has raised $30M+ from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with a team drawn from Polychain, DeepMind, a16z crypto, Flashbots, and Palantir. ritual.net

Contact

Jody Rebak
Ritual
jody@ritual.net