Delo and Harborne Deliver Record Two-Day Funding Surge
Reform UK has received £72 million ($97.4 million) from two cryptocurrency-linked billionaires in less than 48 hours, giving Nigel Farage’s party an unprecedented injection of political funding just as Parliament considers tighter rules governing large and cryptocurrency donations.
BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo disclosed on Friday that he had given Reform £36 million ($48.7 million), the largest single donation to a British political party on record. Christopher Harborne, a Tether investor and already one of Reform’s most significant financial backers, announced on Saturday that he had matched Delo’s contribution with another £36 million.
The two donations delivered more money to Reform in two days than either Labour or the Conservatives spent during the last general election campaign.
Delo said he had originally intended to contribute £1 million a month until the next general election but decided to bring the funding forward because of proposals to tighten political donation rules. He argued that the money would allow Reform to spend less time fundraising and more time preparing for a potential future government.
The £36 million payment surpassed the previous record of £10 million left to the Conservative Party by Lord John Sainsbury’s estate.
Delo, 42, co-founded BitMEX with Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed in 2014. The exchange became one of the most influential venues in crypto derivatives markets, particularly through its early role in popularizing perpetual swaps and highly leveraged Bitcoin trading.
Delo pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act after prosecutors said BitMEX failed to establish and maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering program. He agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine and was sentenced to 30 months of probation. President Donald Trump pardoned Delo, Hayes, Reed and former BitMEX executive Gregory Dwyer in March 2025.
The political donation comes during the final weeks of the exchange Delo helped create. BitMEX is already in the final stages of its shutdown and is scheduled to cease exchange operations on Sept. 23 after more than 11 years in business. Its owner said the closure followed a strategic review rather than financial distress or an immediate regulatory event.
Harborne’s involvement adds another major crypto connection. He is a longtime Reform donor and an investor in Tether, whose USDT remains the world’s dominant dollar stablecoin. The reach of Tether’s stablecoin network has continued to expand across exchanges, payment infrastructure and multiple blockchains.
Neither Delo nor Harborne disclosed whether the new donations were made in cash, cryptocurrency or another form. That is significant because the UK is simultaneously considering restrictions specifically targeting crypto political donations.
The Representation of the People Bill completed its Commons stages earlier this month and moved to the House of Lords on Sept. 3, with its second reading held on Sept. 11. Among its provisions is a proposed moratorium on political donations made using cryptoassets until regulators are satisfied that sufficient transparency and verification safeguards exist.
The legislation would also impose a £100,000 annual limit on donations from certain British citizens registered to vote from overseas and would introduce additional restrictions covering some recently returned overseas residents. It is not a blanket £100,000 cap on every political donor.
The government intends relevant provisions to apply retrospectively to qualifying donations received from March 25 once the legislation takes effect, with parties generally given 30 days to return money that becomes impermissible under the new rules.
However, the bill has not yet completed the House of Lords or received royal assent, meaning the proposed restrictions are not currently in force. There is also no public evidence that either of the new £36 million donations was paid in cryptocurrency, so the proposed crypto moratorium cannot automatically be assumed to apply to them.
Reform has a particularly direct connection to the debate. It became the first UK political party to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations in May 2025. Farage has also backed policies including reducing capital gains tax on crypto to 10% and establishing a Bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England if Reform enters government.
The funding surge comes while the party faces separate scrutiny over political financing. The Metropolitan Police recently expanded a criminal investigation following allegations concerning possible routes for foreign funding into Reform. The party has denied wrongdoing and said it would cooperate with authorities.
Why the £72 Million Matters Beyond Reform UK
The striking part of this story is not simply the size of one political donation. It is how quickly wealth created around the cryptocurrency industry is becoming capable of influencing the financial scale of mainstream electoral politics.
£72 million is an enormous amount of money for a British political party. For Reform, it could fund staff, data operations, candidate recruitment, advertising and organizational infrastructure on a scale that would previously have required years of smaller donations.
But concentrated funding also creates a different kind of risk.
When two individuals account for such a large injection of capital, every policy affecting their industries will attract additional scrutiny. That does not establish that either donor bought influence, and Harborne has explicitly said he expects nothing in return. It does mean that future Reform policies involving stablecoins, cryptocurrency taxation, exchanges or digital-asset regulation are likely to be examined through the lens of its donor base.
Crypto has already encountered this problem elsewhere. In the United States, politics and crypto have become increasingly entangled, complicating debates over legislation that might otherwise be assessed primarily on market structure, investor protection and regulatory clarity.
For the industry, that can cut both ways.
Political support can accelerate discussion of policies the sector wants, such as lower taxation, clearer licensing rules or greater institutional adoption. But very large donations from crypto-linked individuals can also make those same policy proposals easier for opponents to portray as benefiting donors rather than the wider market.
That reputational consideration is becoming more important as crypto regulation is tightening across major markets. The sector increasingly wants to be treated as ordinary financial infrastructure. That requires not only clearer rules but also confidence that regulatory decisions are being made independently of political fundraising.
There is another important distinction for investors: these are personal political donations. Delo’s contribution should not be treated as a BitMEX corporate payment, just as Harborne’s donation should not automatically be interpreted as money from Tether. There is currently no evidence that either company directed the gifts.
That separation matters because political controversy surrounding a shareholder, founder or investor does not automatically translate into financial exposure for the business with which that individual is associated.
The immediate question now moves to Parliament.
The Lords can amend the Representation of the People Bill before sending it back to the Commons, and the scale of this week’s donations is likely to intensify debate over whether the UK should go further and impose a broader cap on political giving. The current proposal does not create such a universal ceiling.
The form of the two £36 million payments is also worth watching. If both were conventional sterling transfers, the headline connection to the proposed crypto moratorium becomes mainly political rather than operational. If either was made using cryptoassets, the retrospective provisions could become much more significant once the bill becomes law.
Either way, the episode shows how far the cryptocurrency sector has moved from the edges of finance. One of the founders of an exchange once synonymous with highly leveraged Bitcoin trading and a major investor connected to the world’s largest stablecoin issuer can now provide a British political party with £72 million in two days.
That makes the next phase of the story about more than Reform’s bank balance. It is about how British campaign-finance rules adapt when fortunes built around digital assets become large enough to reshape the economics of electoral politics.
Shane Neagle is a financial markets analyst and digital assets journalist specializing in cryptocurrencies, memecoins, prediction markets, and blockchain-based financial systems. His work focuses on market structure, incentive design, liquidity dynamics, and how speculative behavior emerges across decentralized platforms.
He closely covers emerging crypto narratives, including memecoin ecosystems, on-chain activity, and the role of prediction markets in pricing political, economic, and technological outcomes. His analysis examines how capital flows, trader psychology, and platform design interact to create rapid market cycles across Web3 environments.
Alongside digital assets, Shane follows broader fintech and online trading developments, particularly where traditional financial infrastructure intersects with blockchain technology. His research-driven approach emphasizes understanding why markets behave the way they do, rather than short-term price movements, helping readers navigate fast-evolving crypto and speculative markets with clearer context.