An audacious New York lawsuit seeking legal title to roughly 3.8 million dormant $BTC, including coins widely attributed to Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is facing mounting
An audacious New York lawsuit seeking legal title to roughly 3.8 million dormant $BTC, including coins widely attributed to Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is facing mounting legal and on-chain resistance that has significantly complicated the plaintiffs' strategy.
The case, filed under the pseudonym "Noah Doe" alongside two anonymous Wyoming LLCs named ABC Company and XYZ Company, seeks a declaratory judgment granting ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses collectively holding approximately 3.8 million BTC. The plaintiffs' legal theory rests on New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, a lost-and-found statute designed for tangible physical objects, arguing that dormant wallets qualify as abandoned property. To keep filing costs low, the plaintiffs assigned each address a nominal value of under $10, despite analysts placing the collective market value at roughly $293 billion.
The plan was to secure a quiet default judgment worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It has not gone quietly.
Since the case was filed, the blockchain itself has begun working against the plaintiffs. 52 of the specifically named addresses have transferred roughly 34,335 BTC, worth approximately $2.48 billion at current prices. Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, reported that 29 of those addresses moved funds after being formally served in the case. Coins that move are difficult to classify as abandoned, and that on-chain activity is now a central problem for the plaintiffs' core legal argument.
The address list also includes wallets carrying the Patoshi nonce pattern, an on-chain fingerprint widely associated with Satoshi Nakamoto's early mining activity. According to Galaxy Digital's analysis, roughly 21,923 Patoshi-pattern addresses hold approximately 1.096 million BTC. Satoshi-linked coins have been closely studied by researchers and forensic analysts for years, making an abandonment argument particularly difficult to sustain.
The case was on course to produce an uncontested default judgment until pro-Bitcoin attorney Ian Cohen stepped in. Cohen filed an amicus curiae brief arguing that Article 7-B was written for tangible physical objects, not entries on a globally distributed blockchain, and that dormancy is not the same as legal abandonment. His brief also challenged the adequacy of the plaintiffs' on-chain notification method and raised jurisdictional questions, noting that BTC has no cognizable legal address in New York.
The court responded. On June 5, 2026, Justice Kathy King issued an order staying further proceedings, including any efforts to obtain default judgments, until July 14, 2026. Without that intervention, the case risked proceeding to a default ruling with no adversarial opposition, given that the 39,069 defendant wallet addresses were unlikely to appear in court.
On June 18, plaintiffs' attorney David Lin filed a motion to vacate or narrow the stay, arguing a non-party amicus should not have the power to halt proceedings and that the statutory deadline for defendants to respond should be allowed to expire. Cohen filed a rebuttal the following day, and a hearing on his amicus application is set for July 14 at 10:30 a.m. at 60 Centre Street, New York. The court has not yet ruled on the motion to lift the stay.
Sources:CryptoSlate: $2.48B BTC transfers challenge dormant wallets lawsuitBitcoin.com News: NY Court pauses default judgment after lawyer argues wallets were not abandonedBaker McKenzie Blockchain Blog: The Lost Bitcoin Litigation analysis
