The audacious legal attempt to claim ownership over billions of dollars worth of early-mined Bitcoin—including the legendary fortune of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto—is spectacularly unraveling.
According to Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, the pseudonymous plaintiffs behind the controversial “abandoned Bitcoin” lawsuit have “quietly dropped 44 of its 39,069 defendants” after on-chain data proved these wallets are actively used.
The Case That Never Was
The lawsuit was filed in the New York County Supreme Court by an anonymous individual going by “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming entities. It originally sought to claim “quiet title” to over 3.7 million BTC (roughly $274 billion) associated with 39,069 Bitcoin addresses.
The plaintiffs attempted to exploit New York’s highly unusual lost-and-found property statute—a legal strategy that the crypto community immediately flagged as fundamentally flawed.
How On-Chain Data Exposed the Fraud
The key piece of evidence undermining the case came from blockchain analytics. Thorn revealed that every single one of the 44 dropped addresses had moved coins on-chain since the case was filed.
These 44 addresses alone held an impressive 21,443 BTC (worth roughly $1.37 billion) when the case began. They have since moved 46,334 BTC on-chain. For instance, the largest address among the dropped group held roughly 2,100 BTC at the time of filing but pushed 20,405 BTC through the address across 10 distinct spends between March and July.
“There’s no evidence any of the 39K addresses are ‘lost,’ but there’s definitely evidence ‘Noah Doe’ never ‘found’ them,” Thorn remarked.
The $10 Valuation Absurdity
The plaintiffs’ legal team relied on an unnamed expert who valued each multi-million dollar Bitcoin address at “under $10” on the theory that cracking the private keys was uncertain. The plaintiffs admitted that their automated algorithm “cannot accurately determine whether anyone has accessed these addresses before.”
This admission fundamentally undermined the entire case—if you can’t prove the addresses are actually lost, you can’t claim them as abandoned property.
A Precedent for the Industry
Legal experts say this case establishes an important principle: on-chain transaction data can serve as legal evidence that digital assets are not “abandoned.” If an address shows on-chain activity, it cannot be claimed as “lost” or “unclaimed property.”
The collapse of this lawsuit removes a significant overhang from the Bitcoin market. Had it succeeded, it could have forced the court-ordered transfer of early BTC, creating massive legal and market uncertainty.
Market Relief
Bitcoin prices edged slightly higher following the news, with the market welcoming the removal of this legal overhang. The crypto community universally celebrated the outcome as a victory for blockchain transparency—the very technology that makes Bitcoin immutable also protects it from bogus legal claims.