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A New York court is being asked to hand three anonymous parties legal title to 3.8 million Bitcoin (BTC) worth about $293 billion, including the coins long attributed to the network’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Galaxy Digital’s research arm has now published a comprehensive takedown of the case, and the findings are damaging across almost every dimension of the plaintiffs’ argument.
The 901-page First Amended Complaint, filed on May 1, 2026, in the New York Supreme Court under Index No. 153119/2026, represents one of the most ambitious and unorthodox legal claims in the history of digital assets. The plaintiffs, operating under pseudonyms Noah Doe, ABC Company, and XYZ Company, invoked New York’s lost-and-found property statute, Article 7-B of the Personal Property Law, arguing that dormant Bitcoin addresses qualify as abandoned property that can legally vest in a finder’s hands.
🚨 NEW LEGAL ATTACK ON SATOSHI’S COINS@SaniExp first posted about this new case, but we have covered since the fall and now we are comprehensively unpacking
3 anonymous parties want a NY court to grant them ~3.8M BTC ($293B), incl. coins long believed to be Satoshi pic.twitter.com/hni0Smtq5f
— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) May 28, 2026
Galaxy’s analysis, led by head of research Alex Thorn, methodically dismantles the premise. The firm had covered the groundwork of this case since October 2025, when it published an award-winning report on a mysterious onchain dusting campaign that sent ominous messages to tens of thousands of Bitcoin addresses. That campaign, Galaxy now confirms, was the operational precursor to this lawsuit.
Every one of the 39,069 defendant addresses was among those dusted in 2025, and onchain tracing shows both the dusting and the formal court-ordered service transactions were funded from the same single Bitcoin address, which Galaxy calls the Bankroll.
The most technically audacious aspect of the case rests on a single number: an unnamed expert’s claim that each wallet address is worth less than $10. That figure is far from incidental. It is the key mechanism that places the lawsuit under Article 7-B’s fastest legal pathway, allowing title to vest in the finder after just one year instead of the standard three-year holding period applied to higher-value property.
Galaxy’s onchain data exposes the figure as indefensible. The average Noah Doe address holds 97.25 BTC worth around $7.5 million at current prices. The median holds 50 BTC, the standard early mining block reward, worth roughly $3.86 million. Of the 39,069 addresses, 99.9% are worth substantially more than $10 today. The gap between the plaintiffs’ stated valuation and the assets’ real market value spans nine orders of magnitude.
The composition of the defendant set (Bitcoin wallet addresses that the plaintiffs are attempting to claim ownership of through the court) compounds the legal difficulties. John Doe number 1 is the wallet holding approximately 79,957 BTC stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange in 2011, coins that are actively contested by investigators and creditors and cannot, under any coherent theory, be considered abandoned.
John Doe number 104 is the counterparty burn address, an address that is cryptographically unspendable and was never owned by anyone. 21,923 of the defendants are early-era addresses tied to the Patoshi mining pattern, the most closely watched coins in Bitcoin’s history and the very opposite of forgotten property.
Galaxy’s analysis draws a sharp distinction between what a court judgment would and would not deliver. Even a complete plaintiff victory produces only a declaration on paper. The plaintiffs hold no private keys and cannot move a single coin.
The danger, Galaxy argues, lies elsewhere: A New York judgment functions as a cloud on title that could be presented to a regulated exchange or custodian if any of the named coins ever surfaced there, potentially freezing assets and triggering years of litigation against holders who had nothing to do with this case.
The affirmation of service was signed by a self-described blockchain engineer named Carlos J. Voltron. Galaxy conducted extensive searches and found no real person by that name anywhere in crypto markets, on LinkedIn, on X, or in any professional database. The only search result the company found for the name was a 2008 satirical piece in The Onion. If the affiant does not exist, the affidavit of service on which the court’s jurisdiction over 39,069 defendants rests is potentially defective, which would leave any resulting judgment open to challenge without a time limit.
Galaxy concluded that a swift default judgment granting everything the plaintiffs seek is unlikely, describing the probability as low to moderate at best. Even if the New York Supreme Court grants a full declaratory judgment naming the plaintiffs as legal owners, that ruling does not transfer a single satoshi. What it would transfer is leverage over every regulated intermediary that ever sees these coins again. That, Galaxy argues, is precisely the point.
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