A person using the fake name “Noah Doe,” together with two Wyoming LLCs, has filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court asking the court to officially recognize them as the rightful owners of 39,069 inactive Bitcoin addresses containing approximately 3.8 million BTC — valued at roughly $293 billion at today’s prices.
The lawsuit, initially filed on March 11, 2026, and updated on May 1, 2026 (Index No. 153119/2026), is thought to be the first time anyone in the United States has tried to claim ownership of Bitcoin using a lost-and-found property law.
The legal framework being used is New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, a rule originally created for physical lost items — like a wallet found on the street or jewelry left behind in a taxi. Under this law, someone who turns in lost property to the police, makes reasonable attempts to find the owner, and gets no reply after a certain waiting period can ultimately receive legal ownership of that item.
Noah Doe’s legal complaint claims that dormant Bitcoin addresses count as “lost property” under this law, that delivering USB drives containing address records to the NYPD 17th Precinct meets the requirement to deposit the property, and that ownership of all 39,069 addresses transferred to him on three separate occasions: December 26, 2025, March 31, 2026, and April 14, 2026.
This law has never before been used for cryptocurrency. Article 7-B was created for tangible objects that a finder physically picks up and hands over to authorities. The plaintiff never possessed the private keys for any of these addresses and would not have been able to transfer the coins to the police or to any rightful owner who came forward.
A Bitcoin address, unlike a lost wallet, stays fully usable by its original owner even if someone else has identified it — the coins remain unmoved unless the true key holder creates and signs a transaction.
What the Bitcoin lawsuit targets
The 39,069 addresses listed as defendants were not selected at random from dormant Bitcoin holdings.
According to blockchain analysis company Galaxy Digital, which released a thorough study of the case in May 2026, about 21,923 of the addresses in the lawsuit display what researchers call the “Patoshi” nonce pattern — an on-chain signature widely believed to belong to Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Those addresses alone contain roughly 1.096 million BTC, valued at approximately $84.7 billion.
Also included on the defendant list: one address containing 79,957 BTC taken during the 2011 Mt. Gox hack — coins that investigators have been actively monitoring for more than ten years — and one address that is a Counterparty “burn” address, meaning it can never be spent and was never under anyone’s control. The Mt. Gox coins are currently part of ongoing recovery efforts and are not, by any ordinary measure, abandoned.
The typical defendant address holds 50 BTC, presently worth about $3.86 million. The average address holds 97.25 BTC, worth approximately $7.5 million.
Based on Galaxy’s blockchain data, 99.9% of the defendant addresses contain BTC valued well above $10.
That $10 threshold is a cornerstone of the case’s legal design. The complaint cites an unnamed expert’s assessment that each address was worth under $10 “as is” when found, on the grounds that recovering the contents is uncertain.
This single valuation pushes all 39,069 addresses into Section 257(2) of Article 7-B — the law’s quickest route, which grants ownership to the finder after just one year from the date of finding, without needing a prolonged police holding period.
The $10 figure is the legal centerpiece of the entire suit, because it is the number the plaintiffs rely on to argue that the wallets qualify for New York’s fastest lost-property ownership path, despite the coins being worth vastly more on the open market.
If the addresses were valued anywhere near their market prices, they would fall into the law’s highest bracket, which requires a three-year police holding period. The one-year shortcut the complaint depends on would no longer apply.
The three ownership-transfer dates in the complaint line up precisely with each find date plus one year — a timeline that only works if the under-$10 valuation is accepted. The expert responsible for that valuation is not identified anywhere in the court filings.
The link to the 2025 dusting campaign
These defendant addresses did not appear out of thin air. Galaxy Research was able to identify all but one of them through an October 2025 report on a blockchain “dusting” campaign — a tactic where tiny amounts of BTC are distributed to addresses, often to monitor wallet behavior.
During June and July 2025, more than 39,000 addresses received OP_RETURN messages — a Bitcoin data field used to attach text — stating that the sender had taken constructive possession of the coins.
Galaxy’s research indicated that those messages appeared to be laying the groundwork for a legal abandonment claim. That report was awarded Best Crypto Research for 2025 by the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers.
Galaxy’s May 2026 investigation tracked the funds behind both the 2025 dusting campaign and the 2026 court-ordered on-chain notification process back to a single Bitcoin address, which Galaxy refers to as the “Bankroll” address. The company determined that 99.6% of the 2025 dusting transactions were funded within two transaction hops from that address, and the same address paid for the 2026 notification effort.
Because the defendants are anonymous Bitcoin addresses, the court permitted alternative legal notification under CPLR § 308(5): each address received a 546-satoshi payment (about 4 cents) carrying an OP_RETURN message directing to a website hosting the court documents. Galaxy verified 98 batch transactions across Bitcoin blocks 950,446 to 950,576, reaching all 39,069 addresses between May 21 and 22, 2026.
Whether this method qualifies as sufficient legal notice remains an open question. On-chain notification has been used before in Ethereum cases, where wallets use an account-based model and tokens sent to an address typically show up in wallet applications.
Bitcoin works differently — wallets are structured around unspent transaction outputs, and most Bitcoin wallet software does not show OP_RETURN data at all. Many wallets automatically filter incoming dust transactions as spam.
What a victory would — and would not — accomplish
Legal experts across the cryptocurrency industry generally agree that even if the plaintiff wins the case outright, Noah Doe would not be able to spend or transfer a single coin. Without the private keys, a court declaration provides no ability to transact on the Bitcoin network. The protocol does not acknowledge court rulings; only a valid cryptographic signature can move BTC.
The real concern, as Galaxy and legal analysts have pointed, is something else entirely. A court declaration could act as a “cloud on title” — a legal document the plaintiffs could show to a regulated exchange or custodian if any of the listed coins ever surface at a centralized platform.
That could lead to asset freezes and compel the original owners to come forward and prove their ownership, potentially sacrificing their privacy in the process. It is this leverage over regulated intermediaries, rather than any direct ability to seize coins, that gives the case its potential significance.
Since the defendants are pseudonymous addresses that are unlikely to appear in court, a technical default could happen around late June 2026, roughly 30 days after the notification process. A motion for default judgment would probably follow.
The court still has the authority to hold a hearing before granting any ownership declaration, and legal observers point out that the untested nature of the legal theory and the enormous size of the claim are factors that typically encourage careful judicial review.
