Someone has set their sights on nearly 300 billion dollars' worth of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin wallets: no private keys, yet they want ownership.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

A New York court has received a peculiar lawsuit for confirming ownership: someone claims to have "found" 39,069 long-dormant Bitcoin wallets.

The attachment submitted with the lawsuit spans 889 pages, with each line listing a Bitcoin address, resembling a digital world's lost property list. The first address, 1FeexV6b..., has long been associated by on-chain observers with the stolen bitcoins from Mt. Gox.

This case was filed with the Supreme Court of New York County on May 1, 2026. The plaintiff, using the pseudonym Noah Doe, is joined by two other companies that also conceal their real names: ABC Company and XYZ Company. The defendants are referred to as John Does 1-39,069, pointing to the unidentified potential claimants behind these addresses.

The plaintiff requests the court to confirm that these wallets and their corresponding digital assets legally belong to them. According to estimates from the founder of the on-chain analytics platform Timechain Index, the listed addresses collectively hold approximately 3.79 million BTC, valued at nearly 290 billion dollars.

The court has yet to establish this figure or the asset ownership; however, there is an absurd yet serious question here: can a visible on-chain address that no one can easily spend be "picked up" by someone like a wallet on a park bench?

He first found the addresses, then sent "claim notices" to them

According to the lawsuit, the story began in October 2024.

Noah Doe claims he identified certain digital wallets as posing security risks, suggesting that the holders might have lost the ability to access the assets. Subsequently, he developed an algorithm to search for self-custodied wallets that had not seen transaction activity for at least five years and appeared abandoned.

In the plaintiff's narrative, a wallet is included in the initial scope primarily if it meets several conditions: the address has not had any outbound transfers or visible activity for at least five years; the wallet is not held by a third-party custodial institution like an exchange, but is maintained by the holder; during its dormant period, the price of Bitcoin has seen significant increases, yet the address has not seen any actions to realize profits or transfer assets.

As documented in the lawsuit, he found the addresses in three batches:

Here, "found" does not mean discovering a hard drive, paper wallet, or mnemonic phrase containing private keys. According to the lawsuit, he identified and preserved the address records of these wallets, then wrote the records onto a USB drive, which he submitted to the New York City Police Department's 17th precinct.

The lawsuit states that the police returned the USB months later. The plaintiff described this process as him having submitted the found property to the police in accordance with New York law regarding found property.

If the story ended here, it would sound like a peculiar digital lost property report. What truly caught the attention of the crypto community were the subsequent notification actions.

Between late June and July 2025, someone began sending tiny transactions to a batch of long-dormant Bitcoin addresses and included notification information in the OP_RETURN data fields of the transactions. OP_RETURN allows for short messages to be permanently inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, like posting notes on an electronic bulletin board that cannot be erased.

The notifications directed recipients to visit a webpage belonging to Salomon Brothers. The page allegedly claimed that related wallets appeared lost or abandoned, and its clients had obtained "presumed possession" of the wallets. Current owners must identify themselves by October 10, 2025, either by moving assets from the wallet or submitting proof of ownership. Failure to respond could lead to court action as evidence of relinquished rights.

This design is quite clever yet somewhat brazen: first send a registered letter on-chain to the dormant addresses, then interpret silence as unclaimed.

The issue is that Bitcoin addresses do not open mailboxes. Those who lost private keys cannot respond with transactions; deceased holders cannot respond; and those who have long-held cold storage might not even notice such small incoming transactions.

In the Bitcoin world, silence can mean many things. The plaintiff hopes the court interprets this silence as unclaimed.

Galaxy saw a massive on-chain experiment

Before the lawsuit was made public, this action had already left a significant number of traceable footprints.

On October 8, 2025, Galaxy Research released a report specifically analyzing the on-chain notifications related to Salomon Brothers. The report indicated that 41,523 OP_RETURN messages were sent as part of the action, involving 39,423 receiving addresses. At the time the messages were sent, these addresses collectively held approximately 2,334,482.52 BTC.

To complete the notifications, the sender used 3,738 sending addresses, paying transaction fees of at least approximately 0.498 BTC and allocating about 0.228 BTC for small transfer funds. Based on prices during Galaxy's analysis, the total fees and small funds exceeded 87,000 dollars.

This was clearly not a casual on-chain message comment.

Galaxy observed that the party behind the actions first tested, then sent in bulk, continuing to monitor and adjust; funds were split and flowed between numerous addresses, making the paths harder to identify at a glance. Most of the notified addresses belonged to old-fashioned P2PKH addresses, and most had never transferred out after receiving coins.

At that time, many speculated whether these mysterious notifications were related to quantum computing attacks, hacker actions, or some wallet security panic. Galaxy provided another perspective: it seemed more likely to be an action paving the way for legal claims.

Seven months later, the New York lawsuit appeared, providing a real answer to the on-chain puzzle.

The lawsuit stated that from the initially identified 42,001 wallets, 2,932 were later excluded, with 424 wallets showing on-chain activity indicating someone was in control. The remaining 39,069 did not show similar responses and were included in the appendix by the plaintiff, who requested the court to confirm ownership.

The plaintiff attempts to fit billions of dollars' worth of assets into rules "below 10 dollars"

The legal tool chosen by the plaintiff comes from New York State Personal Property Law Article 7-B, the rules regarding lost and found property.

This set of laws is fundamentally easy to understand. Someone finds property, hands it over to the police; the police keep it for a while according to its value; if the owner fails to show up, the property may eventually be given to the finder.

Section 257 contains two key paths:

• If the lost property has been handed to the police, ownership can be transferred to the finder when the police deliver it to the finder according to procedures;
• If the lost property is valued at less than 10 dollars, and the finder reasonably fails to locate the owner, after one year it can be claimed by the finder.

The plaintiff believes both paths support his case.

The first path is that Noah Doe has already handed over the USB containing the address list to the NYPD, and the police later returned the USB; therefore, he believes the related wallets legally belong to him.

The second path is more crucial. The lawsuit states that an independent expert opined that the "as-is value" of these digital wallets was below 10 dollars when discovered. The rationale is that without private keys, asset recovery is difficult, and whether future gains can be realized is uncertain. Since it’s less than 10 dollars, the plaintiff asserts that ownership automatically passed to him after one year of finding the wallets.

This introduces the most elegant yet precarious twist of the entire lawsuit.

To activate the one-year rule for obtaining ownership, the wallets are described as nearly worthless digital fragments; to obtain court confirmation, the plaintiff requests the wallets along with all their digital assets. If the lawsuit indeed relates to millions of BTC, the assets they seek could reach a valuation in the hundred-billion-dollar range.

New York’s same set of rules states that lost property valued at 5,000 dollars or more must typically be held by the police for three years before it may be delivered to the finder.

Thus the court may face an unavoidable question: when calculating value, should it assess "how much a wallet address with no private key is worth," or "how much the Bitcoin associated with that address is worth"?

If an old wallet contains one hundred thousand dollars in cash, it would be hard to treat the entire wallet as worth five dollars just because the wallet itself is valued at five dollars. Whether on-chain wallets can be analogized in this way is the crux of the case.

Seeing the treasure chest does not equal having the keys

This lawsuit has an even more fundamental threshold: what exactly did the plaintiff find?

New York State law provides a simple definition for a finder: the person who first achieves possession of the lost property.

In real life, finding a wallet dropped on the ground does indeed give one actual possession of the wallet (though not necessarily ownership). However, Bitcoin addresses are originally public information. Anyone can see the balance and transaction history of an address in a block explorer, and can jot these addresses down into a USB.

Seeing an address and controlling the Bitcoin within it is separated by the private key.

The records submitted to the police by the plaintiff, as described in the lawsuit, are electronic records of addresses or public keys. He did not claim to have custody of the private keys corresponding to these addresses. In other words, what the police likely received was a list of publicly visible on-chain assets, not the control tools to manage those assets.

There’s even a rather comical technical detail: Galaxy's report noted that this notification action primarily targeted P2PKH addresses, but some very early Bitcoin assets used older P2PK output forms.

Moreover, even if the court were to support some ownership claims of the plaintiff in the future, the related BTC would not automatically transfer to the plaintiff's account. The Bitcoin network does not enforce court rulings; it only accepts valid private key signatures. Without private keys, the plaintiff cannot directly spend those dormant assets.

The potential value of a ruling is more likely to emerge in the future: if some related Bitcoin is later moved to regulated exchanges or custodians, the plaintiff may attempt to use the court-confirmed rights to demand those institutions freeze or deliver the assets.

This makes the case even more delicate. What is truly at stake here may not be the immediate ability to unlock dormant wallets, but rather a legal ticket that could be of use in the future.

The case remains a claim put forth by one party. The court has yet to provide specific answers on whether the plaintiff actually discovered a legally defined lost item, whether on-chain silence can prove abandonment, or whether the rule about items valued under 10 dollars can cover wallets purportedly tied to large amounts of BTC.

The 39,069 addresses in the court's appendix remain quiet, with no defense, no transfers, and no claims of having abandoned these assets. They simply lie there, like a row of safes nobody knows where the keys went.

Meanwhile, someone outside has already written down their name, waiting in line for the judge's stamp.