Happy Friday, In A Nutshell this week:

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🚀⏰ Today’s news should be a ~4.43-minute read (705 words).

🧠 Quote Of The Week

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Ledger has confirmed that some of its devices sold through a Southeast Asian reseller were fitted with a hidden spy implant.

The extra circuit board sat inside the casing, read the 24-word recovery phrase off the screen during setup, then sent it to attackers over a mobile data connection.

Blockchain investigator Specter puts losses at around $86 million, a figure Ledger hasn’t confirmed. The reseller, CryptoBilis, has stopped selling and MediaMarkt has paused Ledger sales in Europe.

The UK’s chances of keeping a £3.8bn Bitcoin haul have risen after a High Court ruling on Monday.

The 61,000 Bitcoin were seized from Zhimin Qian, jailed last year for a fraud against thousands of people in China. Mr Justice Mark Turner ruled her victims must claim under Chinese law, not English property law, which could have let them argue the coins were theirs.

If they can’t prove ownership under Chinese law, much of the Bitcoin could stay with the UK Treasury. The victims’ lawyers, Fieldfisher, are appealing.

If the Treasury does keep it, the worrying question is what happens to the coins next?

Kraken’s parent company Payward has agreed to buy Saldo Bank, a digital lender licensed in Lithuania.

Saldo takes deposits in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, and lends in three of them. Payward plans to add interest on deposits, business and personal loans, credit cards and payment tools for partners.

The price wasn’t disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Less than a decade ago, banks were closing exchanges’ accounts. Now an exchange is buying the bank.

Index giant MSCI has finalised rules that could drop Strategy from its indexes.

The new tests target companies that mostly hold assets rather than run a business, and take effect with November’s review.

Existing members only drop out if they fail two years running. Strategy has called the plan discriminatory, but says it won’t meaningfully hurt the business.

From today, Bitcoin ETFs can list on the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

The Thai SEC’s rules allow only locally built, passive funds tracking Bitcoin or Ether, with no leverage and coins held by regulated local custodians.

Brokers are also barred from steering ordinary investors into foreign crypto ETFs, keeping the money at home.

Orange Juice wants to buy businesses the way Berkshire Hathaway buys companies, and 150 firms got in touch within weeks of launch. Most of them were growing, not stalling.

Co-founder Nico Lechuga, founding partner at Ego Death Capital, joins Jordan to unpack the model. It’s a permanent capital vehicle that buys cash-flow-positive businesses, keeps the owner-operators in place, and sweeps the free cash flow into Bitcoin.

The episode is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify

1. BBN Manchester: What Happens to Your Bitcoin When You Die?

2. Oyster cards holding dead cash worth a quarter of a billion pounds

3. MORE: UK's first Bitcoin-backed preferred shares started trading with a 12% annual dividend paid weekly

4. Trezor: following the Ledger incident, is tightening its reseller network

5. Binance is shutting its Bitcoin mining pool that once handled 2.3% of the network

6. Bank of America fined $1.2 billion over money-laundering violations

7. Satoshi statue unveiled in the Austrian city of Vienna

8. Strive is launching a second preferred share called SATS, yielding 15% a year, paid daily

9. Square Credit Card will soon earn you 3% cashback, paid in Bitcoin

10. Jeonbuk Bank has become South Korea’s first bank to lend against Bitcoin

11. France wants self-custody wallets over €100,000 reported, or a €10,000 fine

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