Ex‑Ripple CTO Mocks Suit Seeking Ownership of 3.79M BTC

A lawsuit filed in New York in May 2026 asks a court to declare a claimant identified as Noah Doe the legal owner of more than 39,000 dormant Bitcoin wallets holding a combined 3.79 million BTC. The filing has since been amended to expand the list of targeted addresses.

The complaint names addresses attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto alongside early miner addresses, holdings of physical Casascius coins and wallets tied to hackers and unidentified entities. At current prices, the combined face value of the listed addresses runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The claimant reported the addresses to the New York Police Department and sent on-chain notices and press notifications to potential owners. The amended complaint notes uncertainty about whether those notifications reached the parties who control the private keys for the listed wallets.

The filing asks the court to recognize Noah Doe as the owner of funds associated with the listed addresses and seeks declaratory relief. The complaint relies on documentary material and on-chain evidence to support the ownership claims.

Technologists and legal specialists point to a technical obstacle: the Bitcoin network has no central authority that can rewrite the ledger or move coins without the private keys used to create the addresses. Thousands of independent node operators around the world enforce protocol rules, and none would implement a ledger change to satisfy a single court order. A judicial ruling would generally affect the coins directly only if private keys are seized or custodians who control access to the funds are compelled to hand them over.

David Schwartz, the former chief technology officer at Ripple who is known on X as JoelKatz, posted that a court might one day approve “something dumb like this” and added “BSV might honor it.” Bitcoin SV, a fork associated with Craig Wright, has at times adopted governance positions and legal strategies different from Bitcoin’s main network; Wright has pursued court-ordered claims related to bitcoin assets and intellectual property in the past.

The filing renews debate over attributing early bitcoin wallets to specific individuals. Researchers and blockchain analysts say attribution often relies on heuristics and lacks definitive proof. The complaint faces the same evidentiary challenges that have affected similar efforts.

Court-ordered claims have had practical effect when they targeted custodians such as exchanges, banks or identifiable custodial services that can be compelled to transfer assets. The Noah Doe lawsuit focuses on wallets for which no known custodian has appeared, and the filing acknowledges uncertainty about whether owners received the notices sent to them. The amended complaint remains active in New York court and is likely to prompt further scrutiny of evidence linking early addresses to named individuals and discussion about legal remedies when private keys are not subject to seizure.