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BREAKING: Chinese fraud victims lose key court battle over 61,000 Bitcoin

A London High Court judge ruled on Monday that Chinese law will decide whether fraud victims own the 61,000 Bitcoin British police seized from Zhimin Qian.

That's about $5 billion, and the ruling makes it more likely the UK government ends up keeping most of it.

Qian ran a Ponzi scheme in China between 2014 and 2017 that drew in more than 128,000 investors, then fled to Britain and was jailed for more than 11 years for laundering the proceeds.

The victims wanted English law, which could have let them argue the coins themselves belonged to them.

Justice Mark Turner said each claimant has to prove they own a piece of the Bitcoin, because being owed money isn't enough.

Chinese law makes that harder to prove, and Caixin reports victims could be capped at what they put in plus interest, with no share of Bitcoin's gains.

Qian bought the coins when Bitcoin traded at a fraction of today's price, so most of the upside the victims can't claim is likely to stay with the British state.

So Britain, already the third-biggest government holder of Bitcoin behind the US and China, is a step closer to owning that stash outright instead of holding it for someone else.

The US folded its seized coins into a strategic Bitcoin reserve in March 2025, and Britain has made no such promise.

Treasury officials have privately asked whether the Bitcoin could help fill a hole in the public finances, the FT reported last year.

Those 61,000 coins are more than eight times what Strategy, the biggest corporate buyer, bought in the whole third quarter.

None of it is final yet…

Fieldfisher, which represents some of the victims, is appealing, and a further hearing still has to work out how Chinese law applies to each claim.

If the ruling stands, the fight is only over how much the victims get back.

Britain still hasn't said what it'll do with the rest. 🚀

AI is stepping out of the digital screen and entering the physical world. Robotics VC deal activity hit all-time highs in early 2026, with investments climbing toward sixteen billion dollars across more than four hundred and fifty deals. 

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Raoul Pal went looking for the numbers that predict which blockchains survive a crash, and the only one that worked ran backwards.

Pal is a former Goldman Sachs macro trader and the founder of Real Vision.

Here's what he posted:

His starting point is that a graveyard of dead chains is normal, since most early-stage bets go to zero and crypto just prices them every second.

He took twelve chains at the January 2025 peak and checked which of the usual stats predicted the smallest fall over the next thirteen months.

Fee yield (the fees a chain earns against its value) told him nothing, and neither did the money locked in its apps against the token's value.

The one signal that worked was velocity, how fast money churned through each chain's exchanges, and it worked in reverse.

Money was cycling through Solana at roughly 200 times its locked value that January, against about 7 times on Ethereum.

In his read, fast money was mostly speculation, and it left nothing behind when it went.

What he watches instead is whether each user keeps as much money working through a crash, whether stablecoin balances keep growing while the token falls, and whether developers keep arriving.

By his count only Ethereum, Solana and Sui kept their money per user steady through the drawdown.

To be fair, Pal sits on the Sui Foundation, though he says Sui turned up in his results after he'd done the work.

If you hold altcoins, his test is worth borrowing, so watch who stays when the price drops and treat heavy trading at the top as a warning.

In Pal's numbers, the chains trading hardest at the top fell furthest after it. 👻

Today we're looking at BTC Risk, a simple way to gauge where we are in the cycle.

BTC Risk compresses years of price action into a number between 0 and 1:

It doesn't call exact tops or bottoms. It shows you when risk-reward is tilted in your favour.

Current BTC Risk: 0.494 (two weeks ago: 0.488)

The gauge barely moved this fortnight, rising 0.006.

That's about a seventh of the 0.040 it added last time, and a long way off the 0.073 and 0.074 jumps earlier in the run.

It has now risen in four of the last five updates, from 0.300 to 0.494.

It sits just 0.006 below the 0.5 midpoint, the closest it's come to the middle in this run. ⚖️

MediaMarktSaturn pulls Ledger products amid tampering reports. Ledger says the implants sent users' recovery phrases over cellular networks, and it is now looking into reports beyond the Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis.

Strive Buys $280 Million in Bitcoin, Its Largest Purchase in Months. Strive bought 3,311 BTC at about $84,500 each between Oct. 5 and Oct. 9, taking its holdings to 32,773 BTC.

Russia’s largest bank Sberbank secures approval to trade crypto. The Bank of Russia added Sberbank to its crypto exchange register, and the bank plans to open trading to all clients on Dec. 1.

Interactive Brokers expands crypto services with Ethereum staking via Zerohash. Eligible clients can stake ETH through the Client Portal, with Zerohash running the service and rewards paid out as more staked ETH.

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Select your answer below and you’ll be redirected to the results page. (answer explanation can be found after “Meme Corner”)

Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: An Ethereum token backed one-to-one by bitcoin in custody 🥳

WBTC launched in 2019 so bitcoin could be used in Ethereum's DeFi apps. A custodian holds the real BTC and mints a matching token, which can be swapped back for the bitcoin later.

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