£26m in crypto cash bought Reform’s rise
As retail buyers are left holding crashing coins, the billionaires who own the crypto machine are bankrolling Reform. Parliament just moved to stop them.
When Donald Trump launched his own memecoin, the pattern was the one every retail buyer eventually learns. The insiders who hold the token before the hype get out near the top. The ordinary punter who buys in on the strength of a famous name is left holding the coin when it falls. Trump personally cleared more than $1.4bn from his crypto dealings in 2024, and the same dynamic now shadows Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, whose Farage crypto donors have bankrolled a party promising the same ordinary punters a fair deal. The people who bought the story paid for it.
Hold that pattern in mind, because it is the same shape as the money now flowing into British politics. The small buyer loses; the man who owns the exchange, the stablecoin, the machine, wins. And a handful of those winners are Farage’s crypto donors, who between them have put tens of millions into Reform UK. On 14 July, parliament finally moved to shut the tap.
Parliament targets Farage crypto donors funding Reform’s rise That day the Representation of the People Bill reached its third reading in the Commons. An amendment tabled by Housing Secretary Steve Reed writes a crypto-donation moratorium into law: any cryptoasset donation to a registered party is now treated as coming from “a person who is not a permissible donor”, which bars it. The same bill caps overseas-voter donations at £100,000 a year. A group of Labour backbenchers led by Liam Byrne, who chairs the business and trade committee, went further, pushing amendment NC34 for a permanent statutory ban and gathering more than 20 signatures.
The timing tells the story. Parliament spent the week legislating against exactly the kind of money that built Reform into a party that could form a government. To understand what that ban is up against, look at who has been paying.
Farage’s crypto donors, named
Start with Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based investor who owns around 12 per cent of Tether, the stablecoin issuer. Harborne has given Reform more than £22m, roughly two-thirds of everything the party has raised since it was founded, including £9m in 2025 and a further £3m in March 2026. That single financial year made him, on the Guardian’s account, the largest individual donor to a UK party in a single year in the country’s history. Across the wider right he has spent about £30m: £9.4m to the Brexit Party, £1m to Boris Johnson’s private company, more than £2m to the Conservatives. In 2024 he also gave Farage a £5m personal gift, which Farage did not declare at the time and is now the subject of a standards inquiry.
Then Ben Delo, co-founder of the crypto exchange BitMEX. In 2022 Delo pleaded guilty in the United States to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain anti-money-laundering controls; he paid a $10m civil penalty. Trump pardoned him in March 2025. In early 2026 he gave Reform £4m in two tranches, announced it in a Telegraph op-ed, and is relocating from Hong Kong to Britain to get around the very £100,000 overseas cap parliament has just written into law. He called the restrictions “tinpot” and urged others with “deep pockets” to “build a war chest and win back our country”.
These are not anti-establishment rebels bankrolling a people’s revolt. They are men who own the machinery of a privatised financial system, buying influence over the party that markets itself as the enemy of the establishment. Tether alone reported net profit of more than $10bn for 2025 on a staff of a few hundred, which makes it, in the words of the journalist Oliver Bullough, “the most profitable company per-employee that there has ever been”, a private central bank “steamrolling the world”. Crypto, Bullough says, “is just money being privatised”. That is the class buying the politics.
A pattern, not yet a crime
The temptation is to draw a straight line from the cheques to the policy, and it must be resisted. Reporting by The Nerve lays out a timeline: Harborne money followed by pro-crypto moves, from the Johnson government’s 2022 stablecoin plan to Farage attacking the Bank of England as “dinosaurs” in 2025 to a £3m donation landing the same day Farage pledged no cap on stablecoin ownership. That is a pattern, and a striking one. It is not a proven quid pro quo, and we do not assert one. Farage held libertarian, anti-central-bank views before the money arrived, and libertarian donors naturally back a libertarian party.
Asked whether Harborne wanted anything in return, Farage said: “No. Absolutely nothing in return at all.” The public record simply shows a sustained stream of crypto money into his projects and a sustained stream of pro-crypto advocacy out of them, and invites the reader to weigh the two. Baroness Margaret Hodge put the modest version plainly: “This clearly raises questions that everybody involved in both giving and receiving the donations need to answer.”
The desk beside the private office
Which brings us to George Cottrell, 32, Farage’s de facto chief of staff. Cottrell was convicted of fraud in the United States in 2017, is a tax resident of Montenegro, and was not added to the UK overseas electoral register until December 2025. His mother Fiona routed something in the order of £500,000 to £1.5m to Reform through donations and a think tank. On 9 July both were interviewed under caution by the Metropolitan Police over Reform donations, following National Crime Agency referrals; there have been no arrests and no charges, and nothing here should be read as an assertion of guilt.
But the detail that survives all the legal caution is this. According to reporting in the Sunday Times and on LBC, Cottrell paid undeclared Reform office costs, computer equipment and software, off his own personal bank card, held access to Farage’s party email account, and sat at a desk beside the leader’s private office. A man with a US fraud conviction, unelected and holding no official role, paying the bills of a party that wants to run the country, from a chair next to the would-be prime minister’s door. That is what unaccountable money looks like when it stops writing cheques and starts sitting down.
What the ban is up against
None of this makes Labour the hero of the story, and the piece should not pretend otherwise. The moratorium is necessary and it is leaky. Analysts at Spotlight on Corruption note the obvious routes around it: convert crypto to cash before donating, which the Electoral Commission says is already happening; use politicians’ personal wallets; or launch a party memecoin on the $TRUMP model, hyping ordinary supporters into a token whose value the party and its insiders can shape. Reform previously took Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tether through a Polish processor outside FCA oversight, pulled the portal when the ban came, and has hinted at legal action. Labour, meanwhile, takes plenty of City money of its own. The rot is systemic, not the property of one rosette.
And Farage is one small fish. The real project is transatlantic. The crypto industry has already poured about $189m into the 2026 US midterms, more than a third of all corporate political spending, with the Fairshake super PAC alone sitting on a $193m war chest funded by Ripple, Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz. Delo’s pardon, Trump’s $1.4bn, the coordinated push to lift every cap: this is an industry buying a bloc of Western politics while its retail customers absorb the losses.
Farage calls the new rules the stuff of “a communist country”. Strip the theatre away and what he is defending is simpler than that. It is the right of a foreign-domiciled billionaire class to fund a British party over the heads of the people who will have to live under it. The small buyer loses the coin. The public loses the vote. The same men win both times.
