A series of on-chain Bitcoin messages claiming legal control over legacy wallets has sparked a lot of debate in the crypto space. Some users are saying that early-era wallets — maybe even ones linked to Satoshi Nakamoto — may have been hacked.
The messages, sent out on July 1 at 12:30 a.m. via OP_RETURN data, included the phrase “we have taken possession of this wallet and its contents.” The transactions involved P2PKH addresses, an old format that was commonly used in Bitcoin’s early days.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz shared a balanced perspective on the situation in response to the growing speculation. He says the incident probably falls into one of two categories: either someone is laundering funds under the guise of a wallet recovery, or they are exploiting weaknesses in old private key generation to claim abandoned wallets.
I think there are two likely explanations:
1) Someone is laundering their own money by claiming they found the keys somehow.
2) Someone has found wallets with weak keys or nonces and is trying to lawfully claim them as abandoned.
Hard to say which.
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 11, 2025
While the messages about the transactions have garnered a lot of attention, there is no proof that Bitcoin’s main cryptographic system has been hacked. The idea that this could involve Satoshi’s own wallets — estimated to hold nearly one million BTC — is still up in the air.
But the event has brought up some old worries about how well wallets protect your crypto. If any keys from that era were poorly generated or reused, they could be at risk of being discovered and claimed by third parties. That is a serious situation, but it is not a new problem, and it does not show that Bitcoin’s current design is flawed.
So far, there has not been any movement from the addresses linked to Satoshi, and no major wallets have been breached. The messages are strange, but the more dramatic stories do not have any tech evidence to back them up.