A UK High Court judge has ruled that Chinese law, not English law, governs fraud victims' claims to 61,000 bitcoin that British authorities seized, The Block reported on Tuesday. At today's $83,552 a coin, that's about $5.1 billion.

The victims had wanted English law to decide who owns the coins, and they lost that argument. Ownership is still unresolved and an appeal is being pursued. The coins were seized in the Qian Zhimin case. The Financial Times reads the ruling as improving the UK government's chances of keeping much of the money.

The US government holds bitcoin too. K33 Research says wallets linked to Washington sent about 17,733 bitcoin to Coinbase Prime in early October, including 12,267 coins tied to the Bitfinex hack. The government holdings K33 can label fell from 324,527 bitcoin to 306,795. K33 also counts wallets it only suspects are government-linked, which puts total transfers at up to 21,500 bitcoin.

K33's reading is that most of the move was custody, not selling. Coinbase Prime is the custodian for the US Marshals Service, and the Bitfinex coins are still in a claims process.

About 1,200 of the coins are linked to the FTX and HashFlare cases and could be sold to pay victims in cash. Nobody has said whether or when. At today's price that's about $100 million, roughly a third of one percent of the $30.35 billion of bitcoin CoinGecko says traded in the last 24 hours.

Neither government has announced a sale. Bitcoin is up 2.8% in 24 hours, a day after The Block counted $771 million of liquidations on derivatives exchanges. If you hold bitcoin, the sign to watch for in these stories is a government wallet sending coins to an exchange, because that's where a coin can be sold.

MediaMarkt's parent company has stopped selling Ledger hardware wallets in all its countries after a German customer found hidden spyware in two Ledgers bought at separate MediaMarkt stores. Ledger says no funds were lost in that case.

The implants copy the 24-word recovery phrase off the screen during setup and send it out over a hidden cellular connection. Ledger says the added hardware leaves its security chip untouched, and that its own Genuine Check can't rule out this kind of tampering.

Ledger has confirmed at least one implant in a wallet sold by CryptoBilis, a reseller in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The investigator Specter estimates more than $86 million has been stolen, a figure Ledger hasn't verified. Ledger says its own systems and direct sales aren't affected.

If you bought your Ledger from anyone but Ledger, its own check won't tell you the device is clean.

Interactive Brokers now lets eligible clients stake ether through its Client Portal, with Zerohash providing the service, The Block reports. Clients keep at least 70% of the staking rewards under the broker's agreement, so up to 30% goes to the service. Withdrawals are subject to the network's waiting periods. Zerohash runs the staking behind the Client Portal.

Ether is $2,515.41 this morning, up 3.8% in 24 hours.

If your ether sits in a brokerage account rather than a wallet, you can now earn the staking yield without moving it. Staking from a wallet or an exchange meant moving the coins out of the brokerage account. The cost is the share the broker's arrangement takes, and the wait to get your coins back.