Ben Delo, one of the two billionaires behind Reform UK’s £72m donation windfall, is unabashed about his success in disrupting the world of cryptocurrency. Asked why the BitMEX trading platform he co-founded is so popular with traders, he recently said: “They’d been using horse-and-buggy. We gave them a Ferrari.”
The 42–year-old entrepreneur now wants to bring equivalent luxury zippiness to Nigel Farage’s party by endowing it with the financial booster rockets which he and Reform’s second crypto-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne, hope will propel the Clacton MP into Downing Street.
Reform and its leader have previously placed cryptocurrency at the centre of their economic plans – saying they want to make the UK the “world’s premier hub” for a boom in digital assets.
Shorts
But economists warn the proposals could lead to tax rises and public spending cuts by pushing up the cost of Government borrowing.
It could also lead to higher interest rates – hitting the UK’s mortgage payers and the small businesses who rely on low-cost loans, economists told The i Paper.
How the biggest political UK donors owe their fortunes to cryptocurrency
The separate donations of £36m each from the two crypto magnates, unveiled over the weekend, represent the largest donated sums in British political history.
Each on its own represents almost double the amount raised by Labour and the Conservatives combined this year. Together, they are equivalent to about 75 per cent of the money spent by all parties at the 2024 general election.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Delo insisted he was “not supporting Reform for personal gain”. He wanted to ensure a “more level playing field” between Reform and other parties.
Harborne, a dual British-Thai citizen who spends much of his time in Thailand, but is registered to vote in the UK, said he was backing Reform’s agenda for a “vigorous economy” and the party was a “start-up” in need of greater funding.
Alongside their success in spotting the wallet-swelling potential of cryptocurrencies, the pair were both born in or around Sheffield.
Westminster and Cambridge-educated Harborne, 63, a descendant of the author of wartime drama The Dam Busters, is worth an estimated £18bn and initially made his money with investments in fields including aviation and defence.
But much of his fortune is derived from his 12 per cent holding in Tether. The company is behind the world’s most widely-traded “stablecoin” – a form of cryptocurrency linked to a real-world asset, in this case, the US dollar. Tether is privately owned and estimated to be worth at least $200bn (£149bn).
Harborne, whose representatives have described him as an “intensely private individual”, has said little about his business empire.
But he previously suggested he sees Tether as a bridge between conventional finance and the fluidity of cryptocurrencies, which can be traded instantly at little cost. He once said the purpose of Tether was “to enable international transfers that, without bank fees and bureaucratic red tape, are both immediate and frictionless”.
State-educated Delo entered the same world from a slightly different direction.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome – a form of autism – as a child, he embraced the world of mathematics and computing from a young age. He wrote his first software at the age of six – a programme for making anagrams which necessitated typing out an entire dictionary.
In an interview last year, he said: “The closest I will get to God is mathematical truth.”
He graduated from Oxford University with a double-first in maths and computer science and initially worked as a software engineer for IBM before moving into financial services and relocating to Hong Kong to work for companies including JP Morgan.
In 2014, Delo co-founded BitMEX, a cryptocurrency platform designed to trade not directly in coins but crypto futures – a contract to buy or sell an asset at a particular price at a specific date.
The highly-successful venture is credited with inventing a financial tool known as the “perpetual future” or “perp”, which has been described as one of the consequential trading innovations of the Bitcoin era.
In 2022, Delo was convicted in America of an offence under the Bank Secrecy Act related to the regulation of BitMEX and ordered to pay a $10m fine. He was then pardoned by Donald Trump last year.
Like Harborne, Delo has in recent years taken an abiding interest in causes beyond the intricacies of blockchains.
In 2019, he became one of the youngest ever signatories to The Giving Pledge – an undertaking to give away the majority of his wealth, estimated at £1bn, during this lifetime. He has donated to causes including maths education, neurodiversity and the Commonwealth.
He insists that his core purpose is “rationalism” and “the pursuit of truth”. Writing in The Spectator last year, Delo, who until his return to the UK in recent times had lived in the same modest Hong Kong apartment he rented 13 years ago, said: “I’m not interested in art auctions or superyachts. I’m interested in backing ideas that scale – and truth should scale better than anything else.”
Both men have previously made substantial financial contributions to Reform.
A separate sum of £5m paid by Harborne, who has a second Thai name of Chakrit Sakunkrit, to Farage shortly before he became an MP is the subject of an investigation by the parliamentary authorities.
Farage has described the money as an “unconditional gift”, which he has used towards his security costs. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Harborne.
What are Reform UK’s crypto-currency ambitions?
Reform has gone out of its way to insist that the donations from the two billionaires come with no conditions attached in terms of the party’s policies on cryptocurrency.
Delo has said his links with Reform are motivated by “love of country”. He no longer had any day-to-day involvement with the crypto industry so that any UK regulation changes “really can’t help or hurt me”.
Harborne has similarly stated that his interest lies in Reform’s economic agenda and its prospects for a UK government that was “able to afford to fund healthcare, education and other public services such as social care, which are incredibly important to me”.
However, Reform and its leader have made no secret of their ambitions for the cryptocurrency sector, viewing it as a source for productivity and economic growth which has been wrongly hindered by red tape and vested interests.
Farage, a former City trader, has said he wants to “bring crypto in from the cold”.
In an interview last year, he said: “Stablecoins, crypto, this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff.”
To no little fanfare, Farage revealed his party’s blueprint for cryptocurrency at an industry gathering in San Francisco last year.
Reform’s proposed Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill laid out in detail plans including a cut in the capital gains tax paid on crypto profits to ten per cent and a requirement for the Treasury to build a sovereign reserve in Bitcoin.
The proposals also included a requirement for the HMRC to accept tax payments in Bitcoin and “other approved crypto”.
The current status of these plans, however, is unclear. The page on Reform’s website setting out the proposals was no longer available on Monday.
Deputy leader Richard Tice suggested that the party’s policy in the area is currently under review.
He made it clear, though, that the party still had a favourable view of cryptocurrencies as an asset class, saying they should be “sensibly lightly taxed”.
Reform did not respond to a request to comment.
Experts believe Reform’s crypto plans could make you poorer
Economists argue that Reform’s plan, in particular the creation of a national reserve of Bitcoin, raise a spectrum of difficulties that could lead to tax rises and spending cuts by raising the cost of public borrowing.
They warn that while Bitcoin is increasingly prevalent, it remains too liable to dramatic fluctuations in its value to be a reliable asset for a central bank or the Treasury.
Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, told The i Paper that making bitcoin part of the UK’s reserves would be “completely idiotic”.
The leading US-British economist said it would “put a major dent in the credibility of the Bank of England and the Treasury” and could increase interest rates.
Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said building a Bitcoin reserve would “increase the chances of fiscal crises” because investors could demand a higher return to hold UK bonds.
He said: “The market could react quite negatively. Higher borrowing costs for the Government is ultimately funded by the taxpayer. So the Government would have to think about higher taxes or public spending cuts.”
If borrowing costs are higher, then Britons could also see “lenders raising interest rates and people feeling it in their mortgages”, warned Dales.
Dr Edward Jones, senior lecturer in economics at Bangor University, said a negative reaction to crypto assets could also weaken sterling and increase both inflation and interest rates.
He said: “A weaker pound can increase the cost of imports and add to inflationary pressure, which could in turn have implications for interest rates and mortgage costs.”
Economists also criticised Reform’s “silly” plan to cut capital gains tax for cryptocurrencies to 10 per cent. It will incentivise a switch away from investment in infrastructure, housing and other areas that helps boost economic growth, they argued.
“It would undoubtedly reduce Treasury revenues, and therefore increase the deficit or decrease how much the UK Government can spend,” Buiter added.