Crypto Billionaires Give Reform UK Record £72M

BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo gave Reform UK a £36 million donation on September 11, and a day later fellow crypto investor Christopher Harborne matched it with another £36 million, according to a report from The Block. The combined £72 million is larger than the roughly £69 million all UK political parties raised in the whole of 2025.

Delo disclosed his gift in an opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph, and Harborne followed the same route a day later in his own column for the paper. Harborne, a Thailand-based investor who holds an estimated 12% stake in stablecoin issuer Tether, framed the donation as “a philanthropic gift to our country” meant to help Reform prepare for government. Reform's deputy leader Richard Tice said the money would put the party “on a level playing field” against Labour and the Conservatives, both of which draw on deeper, longer-established donor networks.

Neither donor is new to Reform's books. Delo had already given the party roughly £8 million earlier this year before this latest gift, and Harborne has been donating steadily to Reform since 2025, including a £9 million contribution that was, at the time, the largest single donation to a UK political party by a living person. Friday and Saturday's back-to-back £36 million gifts each individually exceed that record, meaning Reform has now received two of the largest political donations in British history within 24 hours of each other.

The scale of the money is notable on its own, but so is where it is coming from. Delo made his fortune co-founding BitMEX, one of the earliest and largest Bitcoin derivatives exchanges, before pleading guilty in 2022 to violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act over BitMEX's anti-money-laundering failures. Harborne's wealth is tied more directly to the token that underpins much of crypto trading liquidity today: Tether's USDT is the most widely used stablecoin in the world, and a 12% stake in the company that issues it is a substantial claim on one of the industry's most profitable balance sheets. Reports on Reform's overall fundraising suggest a large share of its donor base now traces back to a small handful of wealthy backers, with crypto wealth increasingly prominent among them.

For the UK crypto industry, the donations are worth watching less for the amounts and more for the incentives they create. Reform has positioned itself as broadly favorable to lighter-touch financial regulation, and a party that receives a meaningful share of its funding from crypto-linked donors has an obvious reason to keep that stance front and center if it gains influence. The UK has been moving in fits and starts toward clearer digital asset rules — the House of Lords has separately backed a mandatory digital asset strategy — and the identity of the money funding the party pushing hardest for deregulation is now impossible to separate from that debate.

Whether the £72 million translates into electoral gains or policy influence remains to be seen, but it has already reset expectations for what a single weekend of political fundraising can look like in the UK. Both donations were disclosed voluntarily through newspaper columns rather than routine campaign finance filings, a choice that itself drew scrutiny from commentators questioning why gifts of this size were announced as personal essays rather than through the UK's standard donor disclosure channels.

Whatever the motivation, Reform now enters its next stretch of campaigning with a war chest few UK parties have ever matched from donors this openly tied to the crypto industry, at a moment when the House of Lords is pushing for a mandatory digital asset strategy and the UK's tax authority is separately ramping up crypto enforcement on the other side of the regulatory ledger.