Ripple veteran David Schwartz has downplayed the significance of what appears to be one of the most audacious legal actions in cryptocurrency history — one that could even overshadow the past efforts of Australian computer scientist Craig Wright. According to Schwartz, the core legal arguments are "comically bad."
At current prices, the wallets at the center of the dispute are worth roughly $293 billion, a figure exceeding the total net worth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
"Lost and Found" Claim
The highly unusual lawsuit was filed by a New York man operating under the pseudonym "Noah Doe," along with two corporate entities. The complaint zeroes in on self-custodied Bitcoin wallets that have shown no on-chain activity for at least five years.
Doe claims to have developed a custom algorithmic method to isolate wallets that have been abandoned. The plaintiff loaded the wallet data onto USB drives and turned them over to police as lost property. His team then began sending out abandonment notices to the various wallet addresses.
More than 400 owners subsequently moved their funds, signaling the wallets were not abandoned. However, well over 39,000 wallets remained completely silent, prompting Doe to sue for full legal ownership.
"Comically Bad" Logic
Schwartz is far from impressed by the lawsuit's legal reasoning, pointing to what he describes as massive flaws in the plaintiff's logic. "There are many significant legal problems with the suit," Schwartz stated. "For one thing, there's no basis for the court to have jurisdiction. The logic that the property was found in the state of NY is comically bad."
Galaxy Research Head Alex Thorn, whose team has been closely following the case, is equally skeptical. He recently highlighted the sheer absurdity of applying local lost-and-found statutes to claim globally distributed Bitcoin holdings. It would be "extraordinary," Thorn noted, for a New York court to hand three anonymous parties legal title to roughly $293 billion worth of BTC.
The massive stash in question also includes coins associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
Schwartz emphasized that the core Bitcoin network would never comply with such a court order, though he acknowledged that alternative forks could be a different matter. "It is very unlikely that the bitcoin network itself would ever do so," Schwartz concluded. "But BSV, and other past and future forks that might honor court orders at layer one, could."
Schwartz added that the possibility of such scenarios was a key reason Ripple worked to ensure no single party could ever exercise that kind of control over the XRP Ledger. "This is one of the reasons we felt it very important to ensure that nobody ever had that kind of control over XRPL," he wrote on May 28, 2026.
Why it matters
The lawsuit targets self-custodied wallets, meaning no exchange or intermediary holds the keys — making any court-ordered transfer dependent on the Bitcoin network itself choosing to comply, which Schwartz says is very unlikely.
The case raises questions about whether local lost-and-found statutes can be stretched to cover globally distributed digital assets, a legal framework that was not designed with decentralized networks in mind.
The fact that more than 400 wallet owners moved their funds in response to abandonment notices complicates the plaintiff's core argument that the wallets were truly abandoned, potentially undermining the legal basis for the claim.
Schwartz's comments about BSV and other forks highlight that different blockchain networks may respond differently to court orders, meaning the outcome could vary depending on which network is targeted.
