Dormant Bitcoin tied to New York lawsuit moves after 15 years

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Dormant Bitcoin moves NY lawsuit

Highlights

Bitcoin address 1KV47, named in a New York lawsuit over dormant crypto, moved 30 BTC on Saturday for the first time since August 2011.
31 dormant Bitcoin addresses tied to the lawsuit moved 17,527 BTC in June, compared to 4,834 BTC moved by five addresses in February, indicating accelerating activity.
A motion to dismiss argues that Bitcoin addresses cannot be sued and inactivity does not constitute abandonment, casting doubt on the lawsuit’s legal foundation.

Lawsuit-linked wallet activity accelerates

As reported by Cointelegraph, citing Galaxy Research, Bitcoin address 1KV47 sent out 30 BTC on Saturday for the first time since receiving the coins in August 2011. The address is one of 39,069 listed in a New York lawsuit brought by "Noah Doe" and two Wyoming-based companies seeking ownership of dormant Bitcoin holdings.

The case centers on whether inactive cryptocurrency balances can be treated as lost property under New York law. According to Sani, founder of analytics platform Timechain Index, the addresses named in the lawsuit include wallets widely associated with Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and together hold an estimated 3.7 million BTC worth about $234 billion.

Activity among the addresses in the case is also increasing. Galaxy Digital head of research Alex Thorn says 31 of the dormant addresses moved 17,527 BTC in June, up from five addresses that transferred 4,834 BTC in February.

Legal questions over dormant crypto ownership

On Friday, a defendant identifying themself as "John Doe 33," who says they control one of the dormant Bitcoin addresses, filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The filing argues that Bitcoin addresses are simply data strings and cannot themselves be sued.

Edwin Mata, a lawyer and CEO of tokenization platform Brickken, tells Cointelegraph that a New York court can decide rights in intangible property but cannot turn public wallet addresses into found property merely because a plaintiff copied those addresses to a hard drive. He says the central weakness in the claim is that inactivity does not by itself prove abandonment under property law.

Mata adds that the wallets named in the suit may reflect long-term cold storage, coins tied to lost private keys, or holders who choose not to move their assets. Without the private keys needed to control the Bitcoin, he says the legal basis of the case remains very weak.

Our earlier article on blockchain-based tokenization in market infrastructure examined how major financial institutions are moving traditional assets onto shared ledgers to speed up settlement and reduce costly back-office reconciliation. It highlighted milestones such as JPMorgan’s Kinexys processing trillions in value, plans to tokenize U.S. Treasuries, and regulatory steps toward tokenized stock trading—signaling that crypto-related rails are increasingly intersecting with core legal and market plumbing.

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