Written by: Gino Matos

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

The law firm CEL Solicitors claims to have tracked the whereabouts of over 5,500 bitcoins, which belong to former users of the early bitcoin exchange Intersango. Intersango was an early bitcoin exchange that was shut down over a decade ago. Based on the current price of bitcoin at about $78,000, these bitcoins are worth approximately $433.5 million.

Previously, a British investor successfully recovered 61 bitcoins from the exchange's dormant assets. This investor commissioned CEL to handle the case on January 20, 2026, and completed a settlement on May 28, reclaiming all 61 bitcoins, which are currently valued at approximately $4.81 million.

CEL stated that former users of Intersango can initiate claims for the identified 5,500 tracked assets, and each applicant needs to submit documentation proving their connection to the historical account balance. This has made various types of documentation retained from over a decade ago highly valuable. Documents like account records worth only a few dollars back then, emails, bank statements, and customer service tickets can now serve as legal evidence to claim multimillion-dollar assets.

The forgotten balance transforms into immense wealth

During the operation of Intersango, the price of bitcoin was just maintaining a low level of around a dozen dollars. In October 2012, the exchange announced the shutdown of its dollar trading market, as the trading volume was too low to be commercially viable. At that time, the exchange sold 625 bitcoins at a price of $12.10 each, totaling approximately $7,563 for the entire batch. Today, however, these 625 bitcoins are valued at $49.3 million.

According to CEL, Intersango began a withdrawal process at the end of 2012, gradually terminating its GBP and USD trading operations; the website was completely shut down in early 2014. Records from the UK companies registry show that Intersango Limited was formally dissolved on March 22, 2016.

Valid evidence for asserting ownership includes the email linked to the account, communication emails with Intersango, and bank statements of transfers to the exchange. CEL admitted that retrieving historical bank statements from nearly 15 years ago presented the biggest hurdle in proving asset ownership in the case of the 61 bitcoins.

California court documents indicate that the recovery of these assets is merely one segment of the bitcoin ownership disputes amongst Intersango customers. The 2025 appellate court ruling in the case of "Norman v. Strateman" mentioned allegations that Patrick Strateman retained users' bitcoin assets after shutting down the exchange and refused to return them to clients. This lawsuit had originally drafted a settlement agreement to preserve and return user assets; the recent appellate ruling requires a re-evaluation of the fairness of this settlement to establish a legal framework for all pending asset ownership claims related to Intersango.

A case file from a California court also records another user asset: 15.46306965 bitcoins. The documents indicate that the customer service system confirmed this account balance prior to the exchange's shutdown, and this asset is currently valued at nearly $1.22 million.

The recovery of 61 bitcoins, combined with the recorded claim for 15.46 bitcoins, confirms that, over a decade later, the account balance records still hold legal validity, supporting users in initiating legal action to recover their assets.

Increasing bitcoin prices drive old users to seek ownership evidence

Continuously rising bitcoin prices have greatly motivated old users to search through old emails, retrieve dusty bank statements, and fund legal claims for ownership—these assets, once deemed as bad debts by users, have now become quite valuable.

If the price of bitcoin reaches $100,000, the recovered 61 bitcoins will be valued at $6.1 million; the recorded 15.46 bitcoins could be worth $1.55 million, and the overall value of the 5,500 tracked assets by CEL will rise to $550 million. Once the price of bitcoin reaches six figures, even small account balances can justify users spending substantial resources to gather ownership materials. For example, a user holding 5 leftover bitcoins from Intersango would see the corresponding asset value reach $500,000.

Blockchain tracing technology provides new tools for asset recovery, allowing investigators to reconstruct the flow path of each asset on the public blockchain ledger preserved since the Intersango era. However, personal asset ownership still requires written evidence to bind on-chain assets, specific balances, and individual identities. Users who possess complete retained evidence have the highest probability of winning claims for ownership. The successful recovery case of 61 bitcoins has proven that even after the exchange has disappeared for over a decade, feasible paths for asset ownership claims still exist.

The difficulty of ownership assertion lies in the absence of evidence

Even if the price of bitcoin falls to $50,000, the asset pool tracked by CEL still holds a value of $275 million; the 61 recovered bitcoins would still be valued at $3.05 million, and the market value of the 15.46 bitcoins in the ownership claim would also remain at $773,000. Large account balances still warrant users to bear high costs for ownership assertion; however, for small assets, once lawyer fees, historical document retrieval costs, and cross-border litigation expenses consume most of the profits, the recovery of assets may no longer be economically attractive.

An even bigger practical obstacle comes from the time span of the evidence. Many old users can no longer access their old emails, have lost paper bank statements, or deleted their communication records with the exchange back in the day—at a time when bitcoin was only worth $12, no one would deliberately preserve these materials permanently. The blockchain can only trace the transfer of tokens between wallets and addresses; asset ownership lawsuits must produce written evidence to establish that assets belong to specific individuals. User rights may also involve shareholder disputes, judicial process rulings, and various parties contesting the ownership of the exchange's remaining assets.

The 5,500 bitcoins proposed by CEL merely represent the total scale of the assets they have tracked for origination; how much actual assets users can reclaim ultimately depends on the proportion that matches verifiable user balance documentation. Whether thousands of bitcoins can return to their rightful owners depends on whether early Intersango users still have an email from the time when bitcoin was only $12, a customer service ticket, or a bank transfer receipt.