Three separate cases have decided three separate questions about Craig Wright. They are often collapsed into one story, and they are not one story. This post sets out what each judgment says, in the judgment's own words, and then sets out what none of them decided.
Nothing here is a claim about who Satoshi Nakamoto is. That is not known, this site does not guess at it, and the directory entry for the pseudonym says the same.
COPA v Wright: the identity trial
The case is Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Craig Steven Wright, neutral citation [2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch), in the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, Business and Property Courts, Intellectual Property List. The judge was Mr Justice Mellor. The trial ran from February into March 2024. He announced the result at the end of closing submissions on 14 March 2024 and handed down the written reasons on 20 May 2024.
The four declarations are set out at paragraph 7:
7.1. First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper.
7.2. Second, Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period between 2008 and 2011.
7.3. Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system.
7.4. Fourth, Dr Wright is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin Software.
Authorship of the white paper was a pleaded issue in its own right, which is why it has a declaration of its own rather than sitting inside the others.
On the strength of the evidence, the judgment says at [7] that "Having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me during the Trial, I reached the conclusion the evidence was overwhelming", and at [928] that "the case that Dr Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto is overwhelming".
What the judgment found about the documents
The case turned on documents. Paragraph 918 explains why: "Dr Wright's case that he is Satoshi clearly centred on the numerous documents he disclosed which purported to evidence precursor work to the Bitcoin White Paper and source code, along with his own testimony."
On those documents, the court held at [921]: "I have dealt with numerous points of detail in relation to those 47 forgery allegations, both in the body of this Judgment and in the Appendix. I have found all of them proved." At [923] the judge added that he accepted all of the findings of inauthenticity made by the claimant's forensic document expert, beyond the 47 that were pleaded.
On the evidence Dr Wright himself gave, the judgment says at [2]:
In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
And at [926], on what that amounted to: "Dr Wright's attempts to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto represent a most serious abuse of this Court's process."
What followed
A referral to a prosecuting authority. At the hearing on the form of the order, on 16 July 2024, Mellor J gave a further judgment, [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch). At [199] he referred the papers to the Crown Prosecution Service "for consideration of whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr Wright for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents and/or whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued and/or whether his extradition should be sought from wherever he now is", adding that "All those matters are to be decided by the CPS." That is a referral and nothing more. No charging decision by the CPS has been published, so as of August 2026 the question sits with the CPS and is undecided in public.
An appeal, refused. Dr Wright applied to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal the identity ruling. A later judgment, [2025] EWHC 1139 (Ch), records at [38] that "By an order of 28 November 2024, Arnold LJ refused permission to appeal and certified the application as TWM", meaning totally without merit, "observing that 'the appeals have no prospect of success whatever and there is no other reason to hear them'". An earlier judgment in the same litigation dates that order to 29 November 2024, and the two accounts differ by a day. There was no further appeal available.
A contempt finding and a suspended sentence. The 16 July 2024 order contained anti-suit and anti-threat injunctions. Dr Wright then brought a new claim against a partnership he called BTC Core and against SquareUp Europe Limited. On 19 December 2024, in [2024] EWHC 3315 (Ch), Mellor J found him in contempt on all five grounds advanced. Sentencing followed the next day in [2024] EWHC 3316 (Ch), which records the sentence as "a sentence of imprisonment of 12 months, suspended for 2 years", along with an order to pay £145,000 on account of costs within 14 days, and the striking out of the new claim as an abuse of process. The sentence is suspended, which means it was imposed and not served.
A restraint order and a second referral. On 12 May 2025, in [2025] EWHC 1139 (Ch), Mellor J gave his reasons for granting a General Civil Restraint Order against Dr Wright for three years, running until 7 March 2028, and for referring his conduct to the Attorney General to consider applying for a civil proceedings order under section 42 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. Whether such an application is made is for the Attorney General.
Tulip Trading: a different question entirely
Tulip Trading Limited v van der Laan and others asked whether the developers of four networks owe legal duties to people who own coins on them. Tulip Trading, a Seychelles company associated with Dr Wright, said its private keys had been stolen and asked the court to hold that developers were obliged to write a patch moving the coins to an address it controlled.
At first instance, [2022] EWHC 667 (Ch), Mrs Justice Falk held on 25 March 2022 that "TTL has not established a serious issue to be tried on the merits of the claim", and set aside permission to serve the claim outside the jurisdiction. The Court of Appeal reversed that on 3 February 2023 in [2023] EWCA Civ 83. Lord Justice Birss was careful about what the appeal did and did not settle, at [91]:
I would allow this appeal. The conclusion is not that there is a fiduciary duty in law in the circumstances alleged by Tulip, only that the case advanced raises a serious issue to be tried.
So the question went back for trial and was never tried. [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch) records at [3] that Tulip Trading discontinued its claim on 16 April 2024, a month after the identity ruling, and at [204] that the claim was certified as totally without merit. The law on whether people who maintain node software owe fiduciary duties to coin owners in England is therefore where the Court of Appeal left it: arguable, and undecided.
Kleiman v Wright: a third matter, a third outcome
Kleiman v Wright was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, case number 9:18-cv-80176, before Judge Beth Bloom. The estate of David Kleiman claimed that Kleiman and Wright had formed a partnership to develop and mine Bitcoin, and that the estate was owed half of what the partnership produced.
The Eleventh Circuit, affirming on 26 October 2023 in appeal number 22-11150, summarised the result in one line: "A jury ultimately found that no partnership existed and returned a verdict against the Estate." A footnote to that sentence in the court's opinion records the other half of the verdict: "The jury also returned a verdict in favor of plaintiff W&K Info Defense Research, LLC, on its conversion claim in the amount of $100 million."
Final judgment was entered on 7 December 2021 in favour of W&K on the conversion claim alone, and an amended final judgment of 9 March 2022 added prejudgment interest of $43,132,492.48. Whether Dr Wright was Satoshi was not an issue the Florida jury was asked to decide, a point Mellor J made at [926] of the English judgment.
What the courts did not decide
This is the part that gets dropped, and it matters as much as the findings.
No court has decided who Satoshi Nakamoto is. A finding that a named person is not Satoshi is a finding about that person. It is not a finding about anyone else, and it narrows the field by exactly one. The identity behind the pseudonym remains unknown.
No court has decided who owns any particular coins, including the coins associated with the earliest blocks. That question was not before Mellor J.
No English court has decided whether developers owe duties to coin owners. The Court of Appeal held only that the argument was fit for trial, and the trial never happened.
No court has decided that Bitcoin has, or lacks, a governing body. Tulip Trading's case depended on the claim that a small identifiable group controls the networks. Birss LJ noted at [91] that "If the decentralised governance of bitcoin really is a myth", the fiduciary argument would have force, which is a conditional and not a finding.
A referral is not a prosecution, and a suspended sentence is not a served one. Both are easy to overstate.
Why this belongs under governance
Because the litigation was aimed at the people who maintain the software. The BTC Core claim, which Mellor J dismissed and certified as totally without merit in July 2024, named individual Bitcoin developers as defendants alongside a number of companies. Tulip Trading sued developers directly. And [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch) records at [215] a separate claim brought in February 2021 against the anonymous operators of bitcoin.org for infringement of copyright in the white paper.
People who disputed the claim in public were sued too. In Wright v McCormack the podcaster Peter McCormack admitted responsibility for tweets meaning that Dr Wright is not Satoshi and that his claims to be Satoshi are fraudulent, and abandoned any attempt to prove them true, so liability was established. Mr Justice Chamberlain nonetheless reduced the award to a nominal £1, having found that the case on serious harm which Dr Wright had put forward until shortly before trial was "deliberately false". The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal against that reduction on 26 July 2023, [2023] EWCA Civ 892, in a judgment given by Lord Justice Warby.
And because the Tulip Trading question is a real governance question that outlives the person who asked it. If a court ever holds that maintainers owe duties to coin owners, then whoever holds a commit bit acquires an obligation to act, and refusing to change the rules becomes something a claimant can litigate. That is a question about how Bitcoin is governed, independent of who anyone turns out to be.