In a recent tweet, Galaxy’s head of Research, Alex Thorn, shared an update in the case to claim legal title over Satoshi’s Bitcoin.
In March, a case was filed in New York’s Supreme Court seeking to claim quiet title to 3.799 million BTC (over $200 billion), including coins claimed to belong to the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The plaintiffs in the case, given as “Noah Doe” and two unnamed Wyoming LLCs (“ABC Company” and “XYZ Company,” the “Wyoming LLCs”), asked the Court to declare that they own the dormant Noah Doe addresses and their contents under New York’s lost-and-found property statute.
The anonymous plaintiffs claimed that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins (and numerous other coins) are lost property and that they deserve to legally own them by virtue of “finding” them.
Court case gets new update
Alex Thorn shared an update on the much-watched legal battle with high stakes for the crypto community.
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Crucially, the plaintiffs are seeking legal title over the entirety of addresses suspected of belonging to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto (21,744 addresses holding about 1.09 million BTC).
A default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs could grant legal title to these BTC, setting a bad precedent for the crypto industry.
With the public ledger showing at least some of the supposedly lost owners spending their coins in real time, this might be on-chain proof that the plaintiffs’ algorithm is flawed and that they didn’t ‘find’ anything.
Court orders stay
On May 29, Ian R. Cohen filed an amicus brief arguing that the “Noah Doe” case was bunk.
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Cohen argued that New York’s lost-property law doesn’t cover self-custodied Bitcoin and that dormancy isn’t abandonment, with New York having no jurisdiction over the keys. He put forward the core point that with Bitcoin, possession of the private key is ownership: you can’t “find” a wallet you can’t open, and a dormant address isn’t lost property; it is someone’s savings that simply haven’t moved.
On June 4, Justice Kathy King granted Cohen a hearing and stayed the entire case—freezing any inquest or default judgment. Noah Doe’s lawyers opposed the stay, with Cohen filing a strong rebuttal in the most recent update to the case.
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