U.S. Lawmakers Add CLARITY Act Language to Block "Abandoned Property" Claims on Self-Custodied Bitcoin

A lawsuit in New York is pushing lawmakers to clarify a high-stakes question for Bitcoin holders: can long-dormant coins be treated as "lost property" and awarded to someone else. The dispute centers on a claimant identified as Noah Doe, who is attempting to use New York State's lost-property framework to assert rights over roughly 3.799 million BTC spread across 39,069 inactive addresses. At current estimates, the holdings are valued around $200 billion, representing nearly 18% of Bitcoin's total supply. The claim hinges on the idea that years of inactivity and the absence of an owner coming forward can amount to abandonment. In response, the latest draft of the U.S. Congress's CLARITY Act includes a new provision aimed directly at this theory. Section 20216 states that self-custodied digital assets may not be considered abandoned, unclaimed, or subject to escheatment, and that ownership or finder's rights cannot be transferred to another party solely because a wallet has been inactive for an extended period or the holder shows no ongoing interest. The clause is written to override state and local rules that treat multi-year inactivity as a basis for shifting ownership. The change marks an expansion from earlier Senate drafts dated May 8 and May 20, which focused on protecting the right to hold self-custodied wallets. The July 22 version goes further by addressing property-law implications, including whether coins in wallets untouched for many years remain the legal property of the private-key holder. Section 20216 relies on a defining line: "self-custodied" assets are those controlled exclusively through the owner's private key, without dependence on an exchange, custodian, broker, or intermediary. Federal protections in the new draft apply to that category. Assets held through custodial platforms remain governed by unclaimed property rules, and the draft explicitly preserves those state dormancy, reporting, and remittance regimes for custodial holdings. New York's statutes illustrate why Congress is moving quickly. Section 7-B of the state's Personal Property Law covers items turned over to police after being found, and Article 257 allows ownership to vest in a finder under certain conditions, including for property valued under $10 after a one-year search fails. Doe and two companies argue this structure can be applied to dormant Bitcoin, pointing to OP_RETURN notification efforts, press releases, and claim windows as evidence that the addresses should be treated as unclaimed. CLARITY's Section 20216 directly targets that mechanism by removing prolonged wallet inactivity as a standalone basis for transferring ownership. Under the proposed federal rule, claimants would need more than silence and years of non-movement to advance an unclaimed-property theory against self-custodied wallets. Even so, the provision may not end the current litigation. The plaintiffs cite additional steps beyond dormancy, including police reports, OP_RETURN notices, and attempts to contact potential owners. Those facts could be used to argue the claim is not based solely on inactivity, leaving courts to decide whether the extra evidence changes the legal analysis even if CLARITY becomes law. What happens next depends on Senate negotiations and final statutory language. If Section 20216 survives intact and courts interpret "solely due to inactivity" narrowly, long-dormancy claims against self-custodied Bitcoin become far harder to build. If the provision is softened or removed, judges could retain discretion to weigh inactivity alongside other factors, and similar theories could persist where claimants combine long dormancy with notification campaigns. For now, Section 20216 eliminates the simplest argument in cases like this: that years of inactivity alone prove abandonment of a self-custodied Bitcoin wallet. Whether that protection becomes durable will turn on what the Senate ultimately passes and how courts define what "silence" can legally establish.