A lawsuit in New York has brought long-dormant Bitcoin wallets into legal dispute. On May 1, plaintiff Noah Doe filed a lawsuit in New York, seeking court confirmation that 39,069 dormant addresses and their associated assets belong to him. The case invokes New York State laws on abandoned property, centering on the key question: Can self-custodied Bitcoin that has been out of control for an extended period be classified as abandoned property?
The lawsuit involves approximately 3.7 million BTC.
The legal filing states that these addresses collectively hold approximately 3.7 million BTC, valued at around $285 billion based on current prices. The report mentions that the list includes addresses associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as addresses allegedly linked to the Mt. Gox hackers.
The plaintiff claims that in October 2024, he discovered a security vulnerability that he believes caused some wallet holders to permanently lose access to their assets. He subsequently used his own algorithm to identify wallets meeting the criteria for "abandoned" status, reported his findings to the New York Police Department, and spent over a year attempting to locate the original owners.
The plaintiff requests the court to confirm ownership.
The complaint requests the court to issue a declaratory judgment recognizing Noah Doe and his two transferee companies as the lawful owners of these wallets and the assets within them. The documents show that, aside from 18 wallets, all related rights were transferred in December 2025 to a company named ABC Company, which subsequently transferred 17.7% of those rights to XYZ Company.
This case is not a typical asset recovery matter. It attempts to directly apply New York State’s abandoned property rules to on-chain self-custody wallets. Unlike exchange-held assets, these wallets are not maintained on institutional ledgers and lack established procedures for handling dormant assets.
The focus of the case is on the classification of self-custody wallets.
Currently, exchange-held customer assets are typically subject to dormancy and escheatment rules, but courts have not yet established clear precedents on whether similar frameworks apply to self-custody wallets. As a result, the significance of this case extends beyond a single ownership dispute—it may prompt courts to address for the first time the issue of abandonment of decentralized assets.
However, the report also raises technical concerns. The founder of the on-chain analysis platform Timechain Index noted that the plaintiff sent legal notices to Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash addresses, while many early Bitcoin balances actually reside under a different script format. If this is accurate, the case could face challenges regarding the procedural validity of the notice.
If the court accepts and upholds the plaintiff's claims, the outcome could impact how U.S. state laws handle long-dormant cryptocurrency assets that are no longer held by exchanges.