A NEW YORK FIRM CLAIMS THE 127,271 BITCOIN THE U.S. HOLDS ON AN ORAL DEAL WITH CHEN ZHI — IT NEVER GOT ONE ADDRESS OR KEY — THE LAST TIME CHEN GAVE IT KEYS, HE MOVED THE MONEY FIRST

Hassan Miah says Chen Zhi gave his company, Tiger Mines New York, the bitcoin in what Chen called his “Lubian wallets” at a London meeting on September 18, 2024. Nothing was put in writing. Chen didn’t name one address. Miah swore to it in an August 10, 2026 declaration: “I accepted the assignment notwithstanding that I did not at that time have cryptographic control.” Tiger Mines now says those coins are the 127,271 bitcoin the U.S. government holds and wants to forfeit in federal court in Brooklyn.

Miah had already learned what a key is worth when someone else has a copy. Chen had signed over two frozen Tether wallets, about $160 million in USDT, and given him “certain private keys” to them. Tether unfroze the wallets on or about November 20, 2024. The money moved before Miah could use the keys. “When I asked Chen Zhi whether he had moved the funds, he confirmed that he had.”

Miah says Chen then paid him a $2.8 million fee on November 21, 2024, and never took back the bitcoin deal. But he says that by January 2025 he had “no independent means of identifying or controlling” the coins, and he never got addresses, keys or seed phrases. Prosecutors call Miah and Tiger Mines “at best, unsecured creditors” of Chen with no standing. On October 21, 2026, Miah’s lawyers answered that not getting possession of the bitcoin is “immaterial.”

That’s the whole fight in one word. In a courtroom, a spoken promise can be property. On the chain, only a signature moves coins, and the government says it holds these. A judge will decide what Miah owns. The keys already decided what he controls. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $80,391.