A lawsuit filed in New York is seeking control of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin wallet addresses, a group of wallets estimated to hold about 3.7 million BTC worth roughly $285 billion. Plaintiff Noah Doe filed the case on May 1, 2026 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, asking the court for a declaratory judgment that the addresses and their contents legally belong to him.
The complaint was submitted through Brooklyn-based law firm Lewis and Lin LLC under New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, the state statute covering lost and abandoned property. Court records listed in the filing show the case under index number 153119/2026. Doe says he identified the wallets in October 2024 after finding a security vulnerability that allegedly caused their owners to permanently lose the ability to withdraw the funds.
The filing asks the court to recognize ownership transfers
According to the complaint, Doe created a proprietary algorithm to identify wallets that he believes meet the legal threshold for abandonment. He also said he reported the wallets to the NYPD and spent more than a year trying to locate the owners before bringing the case. The lawsuit asks the court to declare that Doe and two assignee entities, named ABC Company and XYZ Company, are the lawful owners of the listed wallets and the assets inside them.
The complaint states that Doe transferred rights in all but 18 wallets to ABC Company on December 1, 2025. ABC Company then transferred 17.7% of those rights to XYZ Company. Among the addresses named in the suit are wallet “12c6D”, associated in the filing with Satoshi Nakamoto, and “1Feex”, linked there to the Mt. Gox hacker. Sani, founder of blockchain analytics platform Timechain Index, estimated the total holdings across the wallets at around 3.7 million BTC.
The case centers on whether self-custodied wallets can be treated as abandoned property
The legal issue is narrow but significant. The court is being asked whether dormant, self-custodied Bitcoin wallets can fall under existing abandoned-property rules at the state level. Assets held by exchanges already fit into established dormancy and escheat frameworks. Self-custodied wallets sit outside that structure, and the source material says no court has formally resolved that question.
Sani also pointed to a possible procedural weakness in the case. The plaintiffs sent legal notices to Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash addresses, while many older Satoshi-era balances are held in Pay-to-Public-Key format scripts that were not notified. If the court accepts the claim, the case could become a reference point for how abandoned-property law is applied to decentralized digital assets held outside exchange custody.