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New York City dropped a spreadsheet. It named 31,000 properties. And now some of the biggest names in crypto are furious.
The list, published July 24, came out of a new city tax targeting secondary homes — residences not occupied by their owners. To qualify for the tax, a condo or co-op must be worth at least $1 million. Houses need a $5 million valuation. When the city ran those numbers, it ended up with 24,700 apartments and 6,800 houses. That’s a lot of addresses. More than most people expected, actually.
The data isn’t just a raw count of units. It includes full street addresses, unit numbers, and owner names.
Crypto Founders Call It a Security Breach
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams didn’t hold back. He said the sweeping inclusion of units in luxury buildings could carry serious privacy implications — the kind that go well beyond tax compliance. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz echoed that, calling the data’s public organization a breach of privacy. These aren’t abstract complaints. Both men are well-known figures in crypto, and their names are exactly the kind that bad actors might search for.
Castle Island Ventures’ Nic Carter went further. He warned that easily accessible, well-organized data like this could trigger the same kinds of crimes already spreading across Europe — specifically crypto kidnappings and targeted home invasions that have been climbing in France and Sweden. His concern isn’t hypothetical. It’s pattern recognition.
CertiK, a blockchain security firm, put numbers to it. The firm tracked 52 so-called wrench attacks in just the first half of 2026, mostly in Europe. And it flagged a troubling rise in home invasions tied to crypto wealth specifically. CertiK’s term for the underlying tactic is “data-driven targeting” — criminals pulling together multiple public data sources to build a profile on a wealthy individual and then plan a physical attack. It’s basically the intersection of open-source intelligence and street crime.
The New York list doesn’t include any crypto holdings. No wallet addresses, no exchange balances, nothing like that. But that’s kind of the point. Criminals who already know who the crypto-wealthy are — and that information circulates pretty freely in certain corners of the internet — can now cross-reference a name with a precise home address and apartment number. The list does that work for them.
Property Lawyer Flags Overreach, Appeals Window Opens
Property tax lawyer Ben Williams said he expects the list to shrink considerably. His read is that it’s too broad right now, and many homeowners will successfully contest their inclusion. The appeals process is open until August 30. That’s the window property owners have to challenge whether they belong on the list at all.
Whether the city responds meaningfully to those challenges will probably shape how this story ends. The finalized version of the list is due December 31. By then, officials will have had to decide how much they’re willing to trim — and how much scrutiny they’re willing to absorb over the privacy tradeoffs they made.
The data was technically public before all this. Property records in New York aren’t secret. But there’s a real difference between information that exists somewhere in a government database and information that’s been compiled, organized, and handed to anyone with an internet connection in a clean, searchable format. That jump in accessibility is what’s driving the backlash. Critics say the city collapsed years of friction that used to slow down bad actors. Now it’s gone.
A Wider Pattern of Physical Risk for Crypto Holders
The broader crypto security community has been watching physical attack trends for a while now. Wrench attacks — where someone threatens or uses physical force to extract crypto credentials or force transfers — aren’t new. But the pace picked up sharply. CertiK’s count of 52 in the first half of 2026 alone is a number that gets attention. Most of those incidents happened outside the U.S., but the assumption that American cities are insulated from the trend is getting harder to defend.
New York, specifically, is a dense concentration of crypto wealth. The city’s luxury real estate market has long attracted founders, investors, and executives from the industry. Putting a map of high-value properties — with names attached — into a publicly searchable format is the kind of move that security researchers would flag as a risk even if crypto had nothing to do with it. The fact that it does makes the concern sharper.
Property owners who find themselves on the list and want off have until August 30. After that, the city processes the appeals and publishes the final count by year-end. How many names disappear between now and December 31 will tell a lot about how seriously officials took the privacy pushback — or didn’t.
Ben Williams still expects significant removals. But the list is out now. The addresses are visible. And for the people already named, that window doesn’t fully close just because the final version gets smaller.
Frequently Asked Questions
What properties made it onto New York City’s secondary home tax list?
Condos and co-ops valued at $1 million or more, and houses valued at $5 million or more, that are not the owner’s primary residence — totaling 24,700 apartments and 6,800 houses published on July 24.
Why are crypto figures like Hayden Adams and Nic Carter worried about the list?
They fear the list’s organized format — including full addresses, unit numbers, and owner names — could enable data-driven targeting by criminals, similar to crypto kidnappings already rising in France and Sweden, with CertiK counting 52 wrench attacks in the first half of 2026.
