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A New York court is being asked to answer one of the most legally uncharted questions in digital asset law: Can a person who discovers tens of thousands of dormant cryptocurrency wallets claim legal ownership of them under the same statutes that govern a lost wallet found on a city pavement?
Filed on May 1, 2026, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, the case is captioned ABC Company, XYZ Company, and Noah Doe v. John Does 1 through 39,069. The plaintiffs, whose identities are anonymized in the complaint, are seeking a declaratory judgment that would formally vest ownership of 39,069 abandoned Bitcoin wallets in their hands. The case, filed under Index No. 153119/2026 and handled by Brooklyn firm Lewis & Lin, is believed to be one of the largest abandoned property claims involving digital assets ever brought before a United States court.
The story begins in late 2024, when the plaintiff, identified as Noah Doe, a New York resident, developed an algorithm for identifying self-custodied cryptocurrency wallets that had been dormant for at least five years. Using a personal computer in New York City, they ran the algorithm on three occasions. In December 2024, they identified 1,544 wallets after removing duplicates. On March 31, 2025, they found a further 546. On April 14, 2025, the largest batch materialized: 39,911 wallets, all inactive for at least five years.
🚨🚨🚨A New York suit by “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming LLCs seeks a court order confirming their ownership of 39,069 long‑dormant Bitcoin wallets, arguing the wallets are legally “abandoned” property they found, reported to NYPD, noticed on‑chain and in the press, and then claimed… pic.twitter.com/34gH1Jqxxx
— Sani | TimechainIndex.com (@SaniExp) May 24, 2026
The complaint notes three criteria that were used to characterize the wallets as abandoned: sustained inactivity confirmed by blockchain analytics tools; the fact that dormancy persisted through periods of significant cryptocurrency price appreciation when any rational holder would have transacted; and the absence of any sale or movement despite those potential windfall conditions. Exchange-custodied wallets were excluded. Only self-custodied wallets, where the holder knowingly assumed the risk of managing their own private keys, were included.
The plaintiffs argue that a lost private key does not destroy the underlying property. The complaint draws an explicit analogy to a bank account: Just as a bank account does not cease to exist because its holder loses the ability to sign a check, a digital wallet retains its legal character as property even when the private key is inaccessible. An independent expert confirmed that the found wallets are valid on the blockchain and contain digital assets. That same expert valued the wallets, on an “as-is” basis at the time of finding, at less than $10 each, given the difficulty of recovering value from wallets whose keys are unknown.
Critically, Noah Doe did not simply retain the wallets. On three separate occasions, they brought USB drives containing the wallet address records to the New York Police Department’s 17th Precinct in compliance with New York Personal Property Law Section 252(1), which requires finders of lost property to deliver it to the police. The NYPD accepted the drives, issued receipts and property invoices, and later returned the drives to Noah Doe. The complaint cites those receipts as evidence of proper legal compliance with the found property framework.
After recovering the drives from the NYPD, Noah Doe undertook an extensive notification campaign. They hired a blockchain expert who deployed an OP_RETURN transaction to each found wallet, a technique that embeds a message into the blockchain, directing wallet holders to a webpage hosted by strategic consultant Salomon Brothers Strategic Advisors. The Abandonment Notice gave owners 90 days to assert ownership, offered anonymous submission forms, and remained live beyond the deadline.
On Aug. 7, 2025, a global press release was issued. Over 820 media outlets in 37 countries covered the story or ran related reporting, reaching an estimated 10 million people directly and up to 225 million through secondary impressions. Galaxy Digital circulated an independent report on the notice to its clients and the public. Of the approximately 42,001 wallets originally identified, 424 owners took onchain action to demonstrate their wallets were not abandoned, and a total of 2,932 were removed for various reasons. The remaining 39,069 took no action and form the subject of this lawsuit.
The plaintiffs invoke New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, the state’s lost and found property statute, arguing that title to the abandoned wallets vested in Noah Doe under Section 257, either upon the NYPD’s return of the drives to the finder or upon the passage of one year from the date of finding, whichever applies. The title was subsequently transferred by assignment in December 2025 to ABC Company and XYZ Company, both Wyoming LLCs with New York management connections.
The plaintiffs are seeking a declaratory judgment under CPLR Section 3001, a quiet title mechanism, arguing that without judicial confirmation of ownership, prospective transaction counterparties will continue to question their rights in the wallets. The defendants, formally, are the wallets themselves, listed as John Does 1 through 39,069. Their owners are described in the complaint as unknown and unknowable.
The case puts a direct question to a New York court that no legislature has yet answered cleanly: Does a blockchain wallet, an entirely intangible digital ledger with no physical location, qualify as found property under a statute written for tangible objects?
If the court grants the declaration, it would establish a legal pathway through which dormant, self-custodied digital assets can change hands through the court system, with significant implications for the estimated billions of dollars sitting in wallets believed to be permanently inaccessible.
If it declines, it would signal that existing property law frameworks simply do not stretch to cover digital assets without statutory amendment. Either outcome writes a new law.
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