Tether Investor Matches Ben Delo Record Gift: Crypto Billionaires Hand Farage Reform UK 72 Million GBP in 48 Hours

Tether Investor Matches Ben Delo’s Record Gift: Crypto Billionaires Now Hand Farage’s Reform UK 72 Million GBP in 48 Hours

Christopher Harborne’s 36 million GBP match takes Reform’s two-day haul past every UK party’s total fundraising for all of last year

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has become the best-funded political story in Britain, and it is being written almost entirely in crypto money. On Saturday, Thailand-based Tether investor Christopher Harborne matched Ben Delo’s record 36 million GBP donation with 36 million GBP of his own — bringing the party’s two-day haul from the two crypto billionaires to 72 million GBP, roughly 97 million USD.
To grasp the scale: that figure exceeds the roughly 69 million GBP that all UK political parties combined raised in donations last year. Two men, both made rich in crypto, have out-fundraised the entire British party system in a weekend.

“Competitive spirit”

Harborne, who has given Reform 15 million GBP since the last election, announced his match in the Telegraph on Saturday. He attributed the decision to his “competitive spirit” — Delo had just claimed the largest single donation in British political history — and insisted he expected “nothing, personally” in return.
Delo, the BitMEX co-founder, went first on Friday, announcing 36 million GBP in the Telegraph: the biggest single donation ever made to a British party, and more than four times the 8 million GBP he had already given Reform this year. Structurally, the gift is the equivalent of 1 million GBP a month until the latest date Labour could call an election in 2029 — but paid up front, Delo explained, in case the government moves to cap large donations.
Reform said the money would fund “the brightest and best minds to work on policy” and 400 campaign managers — one for every target seat. The party, a spokesman told the BBC, is “now on election footing.”

Not a single pound in crypto

For all the donors’ crypto fortunes, neither gift — nor their previous ones — was made in cryptocurrency. Britain banned crypto political donations in March, forcing the new wave of crypto wealth into politics through traditional bank transfers.
That ban is part of a tightening regulatory vise. There is still no cap on what UK-based donors can give, but Labour has capped gifts from Britons living overseas at 100,000 GBP and plans the same limit for recent returnees. Since March, donors need 12 months on the electoral register before giving more than 100,000 GBP a year. Sheffield-born Delo, who lives in Hong Kong, says he will return to the UK.

Baggage on both sides

Both men carry scrutiny. Delo pleaded guilty in 2022 to anti-money-laundering failures at BitMEX — the exchange he co-founded — and was pardoned by US President Donald Trump in 2025. Harborne is at the center of a live ethics question: the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is weighing whether Farage should have declared a 5 million GBP personal gift from him.
And the party itself is under criminal investigation. On Tuesday the Metropolitan Police opened an inquiry into Channel 4 footage showing two senior Reform aides discussing ways around the ban on foreign money, folding it into an existing probe into payments received before the last election. A party spokesman said Reform “denies any wrongdoing and will fully cooperate.” Neither the Delo nor Harborne gifts are subjects of the investigation.

Why crypto money leans Reform

The donations are the loudest signal yet of a broader alignment between crypto wealth and Britain’s insurgent right. Farage has positioned Reform as the party of financial deregulation and crypto-friendliness, in contrast to a Labour government that has tightened donation rules and pursued a more cautious digital-asset regime — even as the FCA prepares its new crypto licensing window.
For the crypto industry, political influence in a G7 democracy is now cheap by hedge-fund standards. The 72 million GBP committed to Reform buys policy proximity that no lobbying campaign can match. Whether it buys anything more tangible — favorable treatment, blocked donation caps, a light-touch regulatory footprint — will become one of the defining accountability questions of the next election cycle.

The deluge ahead

The immediate practical effect is that Reform enters the pre-campaign period with a war chest no British party has ever held at this stage, funded by two men whose fortunes trace back to BitMEX and Tether. Delo’s up-front payment was explicitly designed to outrun any future cap on large donations — a bet that the regulatory window is closing.
For Labour, the arithmetic is grim: matching 72 million GBP through traditional union and individual donations is nearly impossible, and capping donations now would look — and be — reactive. For Britain’s electoral watchdogs, the question is whether disclosure and ethics rules built for an earlier era can handle a world where globally mobile crypto billionaires can move eight-figure sums into domestic politics in 48 hours.
One thing is certain: with a general election due by 2029 and Reform officially “on election footing,” the era of the 36 million GBP weekend donation has begun. British politics, like the crypto markets that funded it, now moves in violent, headline-sized jumps — as Bitcoin itself demonstrated this week, trading near 77,200 USD amid a volatile inflation-data stretch.