BitMEX Co-Founder Backs Farage With £4M, Plans IRL 'Relocation' to Dodge UK Donor Cap

Ben Delo, BitMEX co-founder and recipient of a presidential get-out-of-jail-free card, has dropped £4 million ($5.3 million) on Nigel Farage's Reform UK party. The contribution, announced in a Telegraph op-ed published April 8, marks what Delo called his first foray into political activism – because apparently running a derivatives exchange with insufficient compliance wasn't exciting enough.

Why a Pardoned Crypto Founder Is Backing Reform UK

Delo co-founded the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX in 2014. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain anti-money laundering controls at the platform. He paid a $10 million civil fine and received 30 months of probation. Yes, the man who helped build a platform where you could trade 100x leveraged BTC perpetual swaps learned that regulators don't find "move fast and break things" applies to financial infrastructure.

President Donald Trump granted full pardons to Delo and his co-founders, Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed, in March 2025. Apparently, the Trump administration decided that if you can't beat the DOJ's crypto cases, you should just erase them with a Sharpie.

In his op-ed, Delo framed his donation as addressing what he called a crisis of honesty in British public life. He wrote that Reform UK was the only party willing to confront the country's problems directly. One assumes "problems" here includes whatever's going on with GBP stablecoins.

"Since the start of this year, I have donated £4m to help Nigel Farage to build Reform UK into a genuine alternative party of government," The Telegraph reported, citing Delo. That's a lot of sats to back a party that's yet to actually win anything – though in crypto terms, it's basically just another alt-season bet.

Delo Plans to Bypass Labour's Overseas Donor Cap

The UK government introduced a £100,000 annual cap on political donations from British citizens living abroad on March 25. A moratorium on cryptocurrency donations also took effect alongside the cap. Nothing says "we take crypto seriously" like banning it from politics entirely.

These measures followed an independent review into foreign financial interference in British politics led by former Permanent Secretary Philip Rycroft. The review reportedly flagged some concerns about overseas money influencing UK democracy – concerns that came roughly three years after similar concerns were raised about Cambridge Analytica.

Delo, currently based in Hong Kong, said he will relocate to Britain to sidestep the cap and continue funding Reform's campaign efforts. The move essentially amounts to a governance proposal: ship yourself back to Blighty, sacrifice your low-tax lifestyle, all to shower £50k checks on a political party that might not even win. Very DAO energy.

Reform UK has received £12 million