New York Lawsuit Takes Aim At 3.79 Million Dormant Bitcoin

A New York lawsuit is seeking a court declaration over tens of thousands of long-dormant Bitcoin addresses that one outside analysis says collectively hold about 3.79 million BTC. The case, brought by “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming LLCs, attempts to frame inactive self-custodied crypto addresses as abandoned property under New York lost-and-found law.

The filing, submitted in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, names ABC Company, XYZ Company and Noah Doe as plaintiffs, with “John Does 1–39,069” listed as respondents. It is not a court order awarding ownership. It is a summons and amended complaint seeking declaratory relief, meaning the plaintiffs are asking the court to recognize their claimed rights to the wallets and their contents.

According to the complaint, Doe allegedly identified three sets of dormant digital wallets between December 2024 and April 2025. The first group included 1,625 wallets, or 1,544 after duplicates were excluded. The second included 546 wallets. The third and largest group included 39,911 wallets. After exclusions and alleged owner responses, the plaintiffs say the case concerns 39,069 remaining wallets they describe as abandoned.

The complaint says Doe reported the wallet lists to the New York City Police Department on three separate occasions using USB drives. The NYPD later returned the drives, according to the filing. The plaintiffs argue that these steps satisfied New York lost-property procedures and that title vested in Doe under New York Personal Property Law § 257 before later assignments moved most of the claimed rights into ABC Company and XYZ Company.

The legal argument is unusual because it treats dormant Bitcoin addresses as recoverable property, even though the complaint acknowledges that cryptocurrency cannot be withdrawn without the relevant private key. The filing compares wallets to bank accounts, arguing that a digital wallet can be uniquely identified by blockchain protocol, address and transaction history. But that analogy is likely to draw scrutiny from Bitcoin-native observers because ownership of a bank account and control over a self-custodied Bitcoin UTXO operate very differently in practice.

The background to the lawsuit appears to trace back to a broad on-chain notice campaign tied to Salomon Brothers Strategic Advisors. The complaint says Doe retained Salomon Brothers in February 2025 as a strategic consultant to help develop a plan for notifying potential wallet owners and identifying wallets incorrectly included in the allegedly abandoned group. It later says a cyber/blockchain expert sent messages to wallet holders using OP_RETURN, while Salomon Brothers hosted a notice webpage.

Galaxy’s analysis of the related OP_RETURN campaign described it as the “Great Bitcoin Dusting.” According to Galaxy, an unknown actor sent 41,523 OP_RETURN messages from 3,738 sender addresses to 39,423 recipient addresses, which together held 2,334,482.52 BTC when the messages were transmitted. Galaxy said the campaign had two phases: initial trial messages without Salomon links, followed by waves of messages that included links to Salomon’s website.

The case now sits at the intersection of legal doctrine and protocol reality. The plaintiffs are asking a New York court to treat inactivity as abandonment and to recognize claimed ownership over wallets that have not moved for years. Bitcoin users, meanwhile, are likely to focus on a narrower but more fundamental issue: an address can be dormant because its owner is gone, because keys are lost, or because the holder has no intention of moving coins. On-chain, those cases can look identical.

At press time, BTC traded at $77,441.