A $239B claim on dormant Bitcoin wallets faces a new obstacle after old address moves
A New York court has paused a lawsuit seeking title to 39,069 Bitcoin wallets, staying the declaratory-judgment claim until a July 14 hearing on a proposed amicus brief. The case invokes New York’s abandoned-property law and argues dormant wallets can be treated as abandoned if notice was given on-chain. The dispute was complicated by a June 2 transaction from an older linked Bitcoin address, which spent about 35.55 BTC after years of inactivity. That movement does not identify who controls the address, but it weakens the claim that dormancy alone proves abandonment. The core conflict is legal title versus protocol control: a court can declare ownership, but Bitcoin can only be moved by a valid private-key signature. A proposed amicus brief argues Article 7-B was written for tangible property, not self-custodied crypto addresses. The case also sits alongside New York’s separate abandoned-property regime for virtual currency held by custodians.
