A New York state lawsuit seeks to treat some of Bitcoin’s oldest dormant wallets, each worth less than $10, as lost property, including addresses associated with the cryptocurrency’s creators.
The amended complaint asks a state court to award legal ownership of 39,069 Bitcoin addresses to a pseudonymous plaintiff identified as Noah Do and two Wyoming entities, ABC Company and XYZ Company.
Together, these addresses hold approximately 3.8 million BTC, or approximately 18% of Bitcoin’s fixed token supply of 21 million.
Galaxy Digital said nearly all of the 39,069 defendant addresses overlap with wallets that received small on-chain transactions in 2025.
At the time, Salomon Brothers used Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature to send legal notices to dormant wallets, asserting the right to seize them under the “abandonment law” unless owners responded within 90 days.
After this campaign, hundreds of addresses moved their coins and were removed from the lawsuit. The addresses that remained silent became the defendant set.
Old property loss laws meet dormant Bitcoin
The plaintiffs’ lawsuit is based on an attempt to bring dormant Bitcoin addresses under New York City’s lost property law, a framework designed for items that can be found, reported, and returned.
Noah Do and two Wyoming-based organizations claim the wallet was identified, reported to authorities, and was left unclaimed for more than a year, making it an abandoned property item.
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs placed a list of addresses on a USB drive, delivered it to the New York City Police Department’s 17th Precinct, and then continued an on-chain notification campaign using OP_RETURN messages, press releases, and a claim center designed to demonstrate reasonable efforts to contact the owner.
The plaintiffs’ legal efforts rely heavily on Section 7B of the New York Personal Property Law, which allows the finder of a lost item to claim ownership after the required storage period if the rightful owner does not emerge.
Normally, the framework applies to property that is handed over to police and detained while the owner is given time to come forward. The lawsuit asks the court to extend that logic to public blockchain addresses whose owners are unknown, unreachable, or silent.
To expedite the case, the plaintiffs relied on a controversial valuation strategy, alleging that anonymous independent experts valued the contents of individual wallets at less than $10 because the private keys needed to move the coins were not available.
In particular, New York state law provides finders with a shorter path to finding property valued at less than $10 if reasonable efforts have been made to find the owner and have failed.
However, on-chain data contradicts that assessment. Galaxy Digital said its 39,069 addresses hold an estimated $293.5 billion worth of Bitcoin at current market prices.
Further breakdown of the wallets revealed that the average address listed in a legal claim contained 97.25 BTC (worth approximately $7.5 million), while the median contained exactly 50 BTC (worth approximately $3.86 million).
This median value of 50 BTC reflects Bitcoin’s original mining rewards, meaning that many of the defendants are likely early block payments that have remained untouched from the network’s first few years.
The gap between the legal valuation and current market value is at the heart of the dispute. If the court accepts the plaintiff’s view that each address is worth less than $10 because recovery is uncertain, it can argue that title vests one year after each address batch is discovered.
However, if courts were to determine the value of assets by the Bitcoins recorded at these addresses, it would be much more difficult to litigate along the fast-track trajectory that plaintiffs are using.
Wallet list reaches oldest in Bitcoin history
The addresses cited in the lawsuit date back to Bitcoin’s early days and would draw some of the network’s most high-profile and disputed wallets into claims centered on abandonment.
Galaxy Digital said the defendant list is supported by approximately 21,923 Patoshi pattern addresses. This address is part of a group of early mined wallets long associated with Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
These addresses hold approximately 1.096 million Bitcoins, making it one of the largest dormant BTC pools on the ledger.
Their inclusion lends market weight to the case, but also complicates the plaintiffs’ theory.
Coins linked to Satoshi are not obscure assets that have disappeared from view. Movements from these wallets are likely to be among the most closely scrutinized events in Bitcoin’s history and have been studied by researchers, investors, and forensic analysts for years.
Meanwhile, another target is a wallet holding 79,957 Bitcoin that blockchain researchers say is connected to the 2011 Mt. Gox breach. These coins are widely treated as stolen goods or disputed property, and are in a precarious situation with lost property claims based on abandonment.
Additionally, this list also includes write addresses linked to counterparties holding 2,131 Bitcoins. Burn addresses are used to remove coins from circulation by sending them to destinations where they cannot be used.
In this case, legal claims hit a technical wall because the address is designed so that the owner cannot later show up with the private key and move funds.
Many of the remaining wallets last moved between 2009 and 2013, when Bitcoin went from having no market price to trading for hundreds of dollars. Some may belong to early miners. Some may reflect lost keys. Others include cold storage, real estate assets, or wallets controlled by owners who choose not to move their coins.
That uncertainty is at the heart of the controversy. Bitcoin’s ledger records movements, not intentions. Wallets can sit unattended for 15 years because the owner disappears, the keys are lost, the coins are intentionally kept, or the address is completely unusable.
The lawsuit asks courts to presume that the coins have been abandoned due to inactivity, even though blockchain alone cannot explain why they remain quiescent.
This combination illustrates the difficulty of applying physical loss laws to blockchain records.
Judgment creates influence, not control.
Market analysts stress that even if the anonymous plaintiffs win a major victory in court, it won’t immediately sway a single Satoshi.
This is because a judicial order cannot generate the private cryptographic keys needed to authorize a transaction or override the immutable computation of a decentralized network.
Rather, the real value of the favorable ruling lies in its utility as a legal weapon at the interface between Bitcoin’s permissionless ledger and traditional financial institutions.
If Noah Do secures a declaration of secret ownership from a New York court, that document will provide a powerful cloud over ownership.
If the rightful owner of the targeted wallet moves the Bitcoin to a centralized exchange, institutional custodian, or commercial bank, the plaintiff could file a court order freezing the account. This would lead to protracted domestic litigation and force the real owners to come forward and prove their identity.
This move reveals a deep irony at the heart of the incident. The plaintiffs received permission from Judge Kathy J. King to proceed with the lawsuit under false names, citing threats of physical violence or kidnapping if their identities were linked to the multibillion-dollar claim.
However, the legal mechanisms he employs force the actual owners of dormant wallets to strip themselves of their privacy and reveal their identities to public records simply to protect their own assets.
Because the defendants are anonymous coded addresses, traditional defense attorneys are not expected to appear in court.
Galaxy Digital said the technical default is likely to occur by late June 2026, approximately 30 days after the on-chain process services are executed, and that a formal motion for a default judgment is expected later this summer.
However, the company argued that a convincing victory was highly unlikely. New York judges retain wide discretion when evaluating declaratory judgment applications, especially when faced with a new legal framework, questions about process servers, and a nominal $10 valuation on $293 billion in assets.
Alex Thorn, Head of Research at Galaxy Digital, concludes:
“It would be unusual for a New York court to award legal ownership of approximately $293 billion worth of BTC, including the coins most closely associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, to three anonymous parties based on a lost property theory backed by a dubious sub-$10 valuation.”
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin
