A pseudonymous individual calling himself “Noah Doe,” along with two Wyoming LLCs, has filed suit in New York Supreme Court seeking a court declaration that they are the legal owners of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses holding roughly 3.8 million BTC — worth an estimated $293 billion at current prices.
The case, filed March 11, 2026, and amended May 1, 2026 (Index No. 153119/2026), is believed to be the first attempt in U.S. history to claim title to Bitcoin under a lost-and-found property statute.
The legal vehicle is New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, a statute designed for tangible lost objects — a wallet found on a sidewalk, say, or jewelry left in a cab. The law says a finder who reports lost property to police, makes reasonable efforts to locate the owner, and receives no response within a set period can eventually take legal title to the item.
Noah Doe’s complaint argues that dormant Bitcoin addresses are “lost property” under that framework, that his USB drives of address data delivered to the NYPD 17th Precinct satisfy the deposit requirement, 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 statute has never been applied to cryptocurrency. Article 7-B was written for physical objects that a finder picks up and hands to authorities. The 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 has identified it — the coins do not move unless the true keyholder signs a transaction.
What the bitcoin lawsuit targets
The 39,069 addresses named as defendants are not a random sample of dormant Bitcoin.
According to blockchain research firm Galaxy Digital, which published a detailed analysis of the case in May 2026, roughly 21,923 of the defendant addresses carry what researchers call the “Patoshi” nonce pattern — an onchain fingerprint widely attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Those addresses alone hold approximately 1.096 million BTC, worth around $84.7 billion.
Also on the defendant list: one address holding 79,957 BTC stolen in the 2011 Mt. Gox hack — coins that have been actively tracked by investigators for over a decade — and one address that is a Counterparty “burn” address, meaning it is provably unspendable and was never controlled by any person. The Mt. Gox coins are the subject of ongoing recovery proceedings and are not, by any conventional definition, abandoned.
The median defendant address holds 50 BTC, currently worth approximately $3.86 million. The average holds 97.25 BTC, worth around $7.5 million.
According to Galaxy’s onchain data, 99.9% of the defendant addresses hold BTC worth considerably more than $10.
That $10 figure is central to the case’s architecture. The complaint relies on an unnamed expert’s opinion that each address was worth less than $10 “as is” at the time of finding, on the basis that recovering the contents is uncertain.
That single valuation places all 39,069 addresses into Section 257(2) of Article 7-B — the statute’s fastest track, which vests title in the finder just one year after the find date, with no multi-year police holding period required.
The $10 figure is the legal linchpin of the lawsuit, because it is the number the plaintiffs use to argue that the wallets qualify for New York’s fastest lost-property title path, even though the coins themselves are worth far more on the market.
If the addresses were valued closer to their market prices, they would fall into the statute’s top bracket, which carries a three-year police holding requirement. The one-year shortcut the complaint relies on would not be available.
The complaint’s three title-vesting dates correspond exactly to the three found dates plus one year — a timeline that only works if the sub-$10 valuation holds. The expert behind that valuation is not named anywhere in the filings.
The connection to the 2025 Dusting Campaign
The defendant addresses did not emerge from nowhere. Galaxy Research identified all but one of them in an October 2025 report on a blockchain “dusting” campaign — a practice where tiny amounts of BTC are sent to addresses, often to track wallet activity.
Between June and July 2025, over 39,000 addresses received OP_RETURN messages — a Bitcoin data field used to embed text — claiming the sender had taken constructive possession of the coins.
Galaxy’s research showed those messages appeared to be groundwork for a legal abandonment claim. That report won Best Crypto Research for 2025 from the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers.
Galaxy’s May 2026 analysis traced the funding for both the 2025 dusting campaign and the 2026 court-ordered onchain service to a single Bitcoin address, which Galaxy calls the “Bankroll” address. The firm found that 99.6% of the 2025 dusting transactions were funded within two hops from that address, and the same address funded the 2026 service operation.
Because the defendants are anonymous Bitcoin addresses, the court authorized alternative service under CPLR § 308(5): each address received a 546-satoshi payment (roughly 4 cents) carrying an OP_RETURN message linking 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 21–22, 2026.
Whether that constitutes adequate legal notice is an open question. Onchain service has precedent in Ethereum cases, where wallets are account-based and tokens dropped into an address tend to surface in wallet software.
Bitcoin operates differently — wallets are built around unspent transaction outputs, and most Bitcoin wallet software does not display OP_RETURN payloads at all. Many wallets filter incoming dust transactions as spam by default.
What a win would — and would not — mean
Crypto legal observers across the industry agree that even a complete plaintiff victory would not allow Noah Doe to move a single coin. Without private keys, a court declaration confers no 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. A court declaration could function as a “cloud on title” — a legal document the plaintiffs could present to a regulated exchange or custodian if any of the listed coins appeared at a centralized venue.
That could trigger asset freezes and force original owners to surface and prove ownership, potentially at the cost of their anonymity. It is that leverage over regulated intermediaries, rather than any ability to seize coins directly, that gives the case its potential significance.
Because the defendants are pseudonymous addresses that will not appear in court, a technical default is possible around late June 2026, approximately 30 days after service. A motion for default judgment would likely follow.
The court retains discretion to hold a hearing before issuing a declaration of title, and legal observers note that the novelty of the theory and the scale of the claim are factors that tend to invite judicial scrutiny.
