Noah Doe filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court on May 1, seeking legal ownership of 39,069 Bitcoin wallets that have sat dormant for over five years. The case hinges on whether self-custodied crypto wallets qualify as abandoned property under state law — a question no court has answered.
The discovery
Doe says he found the wallets using a proprietary algorithm. In total, he identified 42,001 wallets in three batches between December 2024 and April 2025. Of those, 2,932 were later reclaimed by their owners through on-chain activity, leaving the 39,069 at issue. Doe reported his findings to the NYPD within days of each batch, handing over USB drives with wallet addresses and receiving official receipts.
The outreach effort
Before turning to the courts, Doe spent a year trying to reach the wallet owners. He sent OP_RETURN messages to every wallet, set up a dedicated abandonment notice webpage, and issued a global press release that reached 820 outlets across 37 countries. None of it worked — the wallets remained silent.
What the lawsuit asks for
Doe wants a declaratory judgment granting him and his assignee companies, ABC and XYZ, ownership of the Bitcoin. He's not seeking monetary damages or criminal charges. The case is a test of how New York's Personal Property Law Article 7-B applies to digital assets held in self-custody.
What happens next
The lawsuit is in its early stages. The court will have to decide whether dormant Bitcoin can be treated like forgotten safe-deposit boxes or abandoned bank accounts. No hearing date has been set. For now, the 39,069 wallets stay where they are.
