An overpriced crypto ghost ship: he plans to steal 3.8 million sleeping BTC using a “lost and found” scheme, and the US Congress is urgently pushing the CLARITY Act to counter it

Author: CryptoSlate

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: A person called Noah Doe is using New York State’s “police lost and found” laws to try to claim 3.8 million never-moved bitcoins (worth about $200 billion, or 18% of the total BTC supply)—on the grounds that “the wallet has been dormant for years and no one has claimed it.” In an emergency, the U.S. Congress added a clause to the CLARITY Act: if you control the private keys yourself, a wallet sitting still does not mean you forfeit ownership. This lawsuit is testing a chilling legal loophole: if your cold wallet sits for too long, can someone else use lost-property laws to take it?

The latest draft of the CLARITY Act, Section 20216, states that self-custodied digital assets will not become abandoned property, unclaimed property, or forfeited property merely because the wallet has been inactive for a long time and the holder has not shown continuing interest—and doing so will not transfer ownership to another person or give the discoverer any rights.

This provision overturns state and local laws that treat “a wallet remaining inactive for many years” as a reason to transfer ownership.

Senate drafts from May 8 and May 20 protected only the right to hold self-custodied wallets, while the July 22 version expanded the scope, extending into property law and covering whether the holder still owns the coins after the wallet has been dormant for many years.

The clause defines self-custodied digital assets as those in which the owner has exclusive control of the private keys and the assets do not rely on a custodian, exchange, or intermediary.

This definition draws the boundary that the rest of the provisions depend on.

From wallet access to property ownership

Courts must draw lines between two categories of digital assets: coins directly controlled by a person through private keys, and coins held on exchanges, with brokers, or by custodians. The federal protections in the CLARITY Act draft apply to the first category.

State unclaimed property rules continue to govern the second category, because the draft explicitly preserves those rules for custodial assets. Recent state amendments have already treated exchanges, custodians, and wallet providers as distinct categories of assets that may belong to “missing owners.”

A wallet holding its own private keys and an exchange account holding the same dollar value of bitcoin would end up on opposite sides of this line.

In the exchange case, the custodian controls the private keys, so the custodian’s state dormancy, reporting, and delivery rules continue to apply as usual.

The case that makes this provision urgent

New York State’s own lost-property law shows why the provision now has real bite. The state’s Personal Property Law, Section 7-B, covers property someone lost and later turned over to police.

Section 257 allows ownership to be assigned to the finder under certain conditions, including for property under $10, after failing to find the owner for one year.

Noah Doe and two companies are using this framework to claim ownership of 39,069 dormant bitcoin addresses, which hold about 3.8M BTC—close to 18% of bitcoin’s total supply. Their filings point to OP_RETURN notification activity, press releases, and claim windows as evidence that these coins count as lost property that went unclaimed.

This theory relies heavily on wallet silence: the coins being left untouched for years, no one stepping forward to dispute the claim, and—precisely—the mechanism targeted by Section 20216. Claimants can no longer use years of inactivity or lack of communication as the basis for obtaining ownership under state abandoned property laws.

Noah Doe’s plaintiffs also cite police reports, OP_RETURN notifications, and their attempts to contact possible owners. These pieces of evidence go beyond mere dormancy, meaning that even if CLARITY becomes law, they may argue their claim is not based only on silence.

The clause closes the legal loophole their case is testing, but it does not end the lawsuit itself, because the court still has to weigh whether this additional evidence changes the analysis.

What happens next with this provision

In an optimistic scenario, Section 20216 survives the Senate negotiations, its priority language intact. Courts’ interpretation of the phrase “merely due to inactivity” would be narrow enough to provide meaningful protection for self-custody.

Dormancy-based theories like those behind Noah Doe become harder to build, because claimants need evidence beyond years of silence to make progress. Holding your own private keys provides self-custody advocates with legal backing they previously never truly had.

In a pessimistic scenario, Senate negotiators strip out or soften Section 20216 before the final vote. The surviving language would leave room for courts to weigh inactivity alongside other factors when deciding a claim.

The states’ experiments around dormant wallets could still continue, and future claimants may still build similar Noah Doe-style theories by combining long silence with notification activity.

Self-custody retains its protection as an activity: holding your own private keys remains lawful, and ownership during long periods of inactivity remains an unresolved question courts must address case by case.

Section 20216 removes the simplest argument claimants can make about dormant bitcoin addresses: that “nothing happened for many years” by itself equals abandonment. Whether that is enough depends on what ultimately survives the Senate negotiations—and on what the judge ultimately decides silence alone can prove.