New lawsuit claims Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin is “Lost Property” worth under $10 per wallet

An important story is making waves across the blockchain ecosystem. A New York lawsuit is seeking to treat some of Bitcoin’s oldest dormant wallets, including addresses tied to the cryptocurrency’s creator, as lost property valued at less than $10 each. The amended complaint asks a state court to grant legal ownership of 39,069 Bitcoin addresses to a pseudonymous plaintiff identified as Noah Doe and two Wyoming entities, ABC Company, and XYZ Company. Together, the addresses hold nearly 3.

8 million BTC, or about 18% of Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million token supply. Galaxy Digital stated that nearly all of the 39,069 defendant addresses overlap with wallets that received small on-chain transactions in 2025. At the time, Salomon Brothers used Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature to serve legal notices on the dormant wallets, claiming a right to seize them under the “Doctrine of Abandonment” unless the owners responded within 90 days.

Market Dynamics

After that campaign, hundreds of addresses moved coins and were excluded from the lawsuit. The addresses that stayed silent became the defendant set. An old lost-property statute meets dormant Bitcoin The plaintiffs’ case rests on an attempt to fit dormant Bitcoin addresses into New York’s lost-property law, a framework designed for physical items that can be found, reported, and returned.

Noah Doe and the two Wyoming-based entities argue that the wallets qualify as abandoned property because they were identified, reported to authorities, and left unclaimed for more than a year. According to the complaint, the plaintiffs placed lists of the addresses on USB drives and delivered them to the New York Police Department’s 17th Precinct, then followed up with an on-chain notice campaign using OP_RETURN messages, a press release, and a claim window intended to demonstrate reasonable efforts to reach the owners. The plaintiff's legal effort leans heavily on Article 7-B of New York’s Personal Property Law, which allows a finder of lost property to claim title after the required holding period if no rightful owner appears.

In ordinary cases, that framework applies to property turned over to police and held while an owner is given time to come forward. The lawsuit asks the court to extend that logic to public blockchain addresses whose owners are unknown, unreachable, or silent. To fast-track the litigation, the plaintiffs rely on a controversial valuation strategy, claiming an unnamed independent expert appraised the contents of each individual wallet at less than $10 because the private keys required to move the coins are unavailable.

Market Impact

Notably, New York law provides finders a shorter path to property worth less than $10 if they have made reasonable efforts to locate the owner and have failed. However, on-chain data runs counter to that appraisal. Galaxy Digital stated that the 39,069 addresses hold an estimated $293.

5 billion in Bitcoin at current market prices. A further breakdown of the wallets showed that the average address in the legal claim contains 97. 25 BTC, worth roughly $7.

5 million, while the median holds exactly 50 BTC, or about $3. Average Worth of the Bitcoin Addresses (Source: Galaxy Research) That 50-BTC median reflects Bitcoin’s original mining reward, meaning many of the defendants appear to be early block payouts that have remained untouched since the network’s first years. That gap between the legal valuation and current market value sits at the center of the dispute.

Crypto markets are watching this development closely as investors weigh its potential impact on prices.