New York Lawsuit Seeks Ownership Of 39,069 Dormant Bitcoin Wallets Under Lost-Property Law

A New York lawsuit filed by Noah Doe and two Wyoming-based LLCs, ABC Company and XYZ Company, seeks a court order declaring ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses under New York lost-property law.

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The complaint, filed on May 1, says the coins tied to the listed addresses were found and reported to the New York Police Department, and it frames the wallets as legally abandoned property.

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The suit’s address list includes “12c6D,” associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, and “1Feex,” linked to the Mt. Gox exchange hacker, and it estimates the wallets hold an estimated 3.7 million BTC valued at about $285 billion, according to Sani, founder of Bitcoin onchain analytics platform Timechain Index.

The filing also ties its outreach to on-chain messaging, saying Doe sent legal notices through OP_RETURN in June 2025 and that a public notice period ran until October 10, 2025.

Even with a favorable ruling, the case confronts the fact that Bitcoin ownership depends on private keys rather than a court record, and the source material says the Bitcoin network has no mechanism to reassign funds without a private key.

The lawsuit has drawn immediate scepticism in the crypto world, and Bitget’s coverage says ex-Ripple CTO David Schwartz mocked the idea on X, responding sarcastically to the notion that a court could go for “something dumb like this,” and saying the only chain that “might honor it” is BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision).

Noveleader, lead research analyst at Castle Labs, is quoted in multiple accounts saying the court cannot force the Bitcoin network to transfer funds because there is no mechanism to “reassign funds without a private key.”

CoinCentral

FinanceFeeds’ account adds that the “one narrow exception” would be if any of these coins are moved to a regulated custodian or exchange, at which point a court could compel that intermediary to act.

Cointelegraph’s framing highlights a notice and format dispute, saying the plaintiffs sent legal notices to Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) formats while the old Satoshi-era tokens are sitting in Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) output formats, which “often hold no value.”

Castle Labs is also quoted as saying the messaging attempt was “structurally defective” because it was sent to address formats no longer used by the targeted wallets, and it adds that sending an OP_RETURN transaction would be “similarly ineffective.”

The case is built around New York’s abandoned-property framework, with the filing dated May 1, 2026, asking for a declaratory judgment that Doe and the assignee companies ABC Company and XYZ Company own the 39,069 wallets and any remaining Bitcoin.

“New York Bitcoin lawsuit targets 39,069 dormant wallets in court Dormant Bitcoin wallets face a new abandoned-property test in New York New York Bitcoin case questions ownership of long-inactive wallets Court filing seeks control of dormant Bitcoin linked to old addresses New York Bitcoin lawsuit tests self-custody and lost-property rules New York Bitcoin litigation has turned dormant wallets into a property-law test with possible industry impact”

CoinCentral

According to the complaint timeline described in NewsBTC’s account, Doe identified 42,001 wallets, with 2,932 removed after outreach and 39,069 remaining disputed, after a notice period that gave holders 90 days until October 10, 2025 to claim ownership.

NewsBTC says Doe transferred ownership rights in all but 18 of the wallets to ABC Company on December 1, 2025, and that ABC Company subsequently transferred 17.7% to XYZ Company.

The dispute also spotlights how courts might treat self-custodied assets when there is no central administrator, and Cointelegraph’s account emphasizes that even if a court ruled, it would be “only a symbolic move” without technical enforceability.

Beyond the immediate parties, the sources describe a broader dormant-supply backdrop, citing Bitbo data that 3.5 million Bitcoin, worth about $271 billion, have been dormant for the past 10 years and another 6.6 million coins, worth around $577 billion, have been dormant for over five years, underscoring the scale of the property-law question the lawsuit seeks to test.