A pseudonymous person calling himself “Noah Doe,” along with two Wyoming LLCs, filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court seeking a court declaration that they are the legal owners of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses containing approximately 3.8 million Bitcoins — worth an estimated $293 billion at current prices.
the issuefiled March 11, 2026, amended May 1, 2026 (Index No. 153119/2026), is believed to be the first attempt in U.S. history to claim ownership of Bitcoin under the Lost and Found Property Act.
The legal vehicle is New York Personal Property Law, Section 7-B, A Statute Designed for tangible lost items – like a wallet found on the sidewalk, or jewelry left in a taxi. The law states that a person who reports lost property to the police, makes reasonable efforts to locate the owner, and receives no response within a specified period can ultimately gain legal ownership of the item.
Noah Doe’s complaint says that dormant Bitcoin addresses are “lost property” under this framework, that USB drives of address data turned over to the NYPD’s 17th Precinct meet filing requirements, and that title to all 39,069 addresses vested in him across three dates: December 26, 2025, March 31, 2026, and April 14, 2026.
The law has never been applied to cryptocurrencies. Section 7-B is written for physical objects that a researcher picks up and hands over to authorities. Plaintiff never held private keys to any of these addresses and could not have transferred the coins to the police or to any owner who came forward.
A Bitcoin address, unlike a lost wallet, remains fully accessible to its original owner regardless of whether someone else recognizes it or not – coins do not move unless the real key holder signs the transaction.
What is the purpose of the Bitcoin lawsuit?
The 39,069 addresses named as defendants are not a random sample of dormant Bitcoin.
according to Blockchain research company Galaxy Digitalwhich published a detailed analysis of the case in May 2026, found that approximately 21,923 of the defendants’ addresses bore what researchers call a “Patoshi” nonce pattern — an onchain fingerprint widely attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. These addresses alone contain approximately 1,096 million Bitcoins, worth approximately $84.7 billion.
Also on the list of defendants: one address containing 79,957 bitcoins stolen in the 2011 Mt.Gox hack — currencies that have been actively tracked by investigators for more than a decade — and one address that is a counterparty “burn” address, meaning it is not exchangeable and was not controlled by anyone. Mt.Gox coins are subject to ongoing redemption procedures and have not been abandoned by any traditional definition.
The average defendant’s address holds 50 bitcoins, currently worth about $3.86 million. The average contains 97.25 bitcoins, worth about $7.5 million.
According to Galaxy’s Onchain data, 99.9% of the defendants’ addresses had a BTC value significantly greater than $10.
This $10 figure is central to the structure of the case. The complaint relies on the opinion of an unnamed expert that each title was worth less than $10 “as is” at the time it was found, on the grounds that recovery of the contents is uncertain.
This single assessment places all 39,069 titles into Section 257(2) of Article 7-B – the fastest route in the law, which gives ownership to the searcher just one year from the date of the search, without the need for a multi-year police detention period.
The $10 figure is the legal focus of the lawsuit, because it is the number plaintiffs use to argue that coins qualify for the fastest path to ownership of lost property in New York, even though the coins themselves are worth much more on the market.
If titles are valued near market rates, they will fall into the top category of the law, which requires police custody for three years. The one-year abbreviation relied upon by the complaint will not be available.
The complaint’s three title grant dates align exactly with the three existing dates plus one year — a timeline that only works if the appraisal continues below $10. The name of the expert behind this assessment is not mentioned anywhere in the files.
Link to the 2025 dust removal campaign
The defendant’s addresses did not appear out of nowhere. Galaxy research It has been identified All but one of them in an October 2025 report on the blockchain “dusting off” campaign – A He practices Small amounts of Bitcoin are sent to addresses, often to track wallet activity.
Between June and July 2025, more than 39,000 addresses received OP_RETURN messages — a Bitcoin data field used to embed text — claiming that the sender had constructively seized the coins.
Galaxy’s research showed that these letters appear to serve as the basis for a legal claim to give up the property. That report beat Best Cryptocurrency Research of 2025 from the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers.
A May 2026 Galaxy analysis traced funding for both the 2025 dust-down campaign and the 2026 court-ordered onchain service to a single Bitcoin address, which Galaxy calls a “Bankroll” address. The company found that 99.6% of 2025 dust removal transactions were funded within two steps of that title, and that the same title funded the 2026 service operation.
Because the defendants had anonymous Bitcoin addresses, the court allowed alternative service under CPLR § 308(5): each address received a payment of 546 satoshis (about 4 cents) carrying an OP_RETURN message linked to a website hosting the pleadings. Galaxy confirmed 98 batch transactions across Bitcoin blocks 950,446 to 950,576, reaching all 39,069 addresses between May 21 and 22, 2026.
Whether that constitutes proper legal notice is an open question. Onchain has precedent in Ethereum cases, where wallets are account-based and tokens dropped into an address tend to appear in the wallet software.
Bitcoin works differently – wallets are built around unspent transaction outputs, and most Bitcoin wallet software doesn’t expose OP_RETURN payloads at all. Many wallets filter incoming Dust transactions as spam by default.
What does winning mean and what does it not mean?
Legal regulators of cryptocurrencies Across the industry we agree That even the plaintiff’s complete victory would not allow Noah Doe to move a single coin. Without private keys, a court declaration does not grant the ability to transact on the Bitcoin network. The Protocol does not recognize court orders; Only a valid cryptographic signature moves BTC.
The practical concern, as Galaxy and legal commentators have noted, is different. The court declaration can act as a “title cloud” — a legal document that plaintiffs can submit to a regulated exchange or custodian if any of the listed currencies appear in a central location.
This could lead to assets being frozen and forcing the original owners to come forward and prove ownership, perhaps at the expense of anonymity. It is the leverage over regulated brokers, not the ability to seize currencies directly, that gives the issue its potential importance.
Since the defendants have false addresses and will not appear in court, a technical default could occur around late June 2026, approximately 30 days after service. A motion for default judgment will likely follow.
The court retains the discretion to hold a hearing before issuing a declaration of ownership, and legal observers point out that the novelty of the theory and the size of the claim are factors that tend to invite judicial scrutiny.
