Ben Delo

Ben Delo (, born 24 February 1984) is a British entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and former executive of BitMEX. In 2022, Delo pleaded guilty to a United States Bank Secrecy Act violation and received a 30-month probation sentence. In 2025, Delo was pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Early life Ben Peter Delo was born in Sheffield, England. He was educated at Lord Williams's School and graduated from the University of Oxford in 2005 with a double first-class honours degree in mathematics and computer science.

Career After a summer internship at IBM, he was hired by the company. He went on to develop high-frequency trading systems at hedge funds and banks such as GSA Capital and J.P. Morgan, dealing predominantly in kdb+/Q. After working with IBM, he moved to Hong Kong in 2012 to work for JP Morgan, at which point he developed an interest in buying Bitcoin. In 2018, The Times reported that Delo was the United Kingdom's youngest self-made billionaire. As noted in a 2020 IPSO complaint, The Times removed a reference that he had been included in the 2018 Sunday Times Rich List.

In August 2022, Izabella Kaminska at Bloomberg described Delo as "the BitMEX co-founder most responsible for the perpetual swap’s invention."

In early 2026, Delo gave £4 million to Reform UK, and in April 2026 announced he was moving back to the UK after the Labour government changed the law to put a £100,000 cap on political donations from Britons living abroad. In an article in The Telegraph, he wrote that England was his home and that “the biggest obstacle to national recovery is the entrenched self-deception of our elites”.

Bank Secrecy Act violation On 1 October 2020, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the US Department of Justice charged BitMEX and its co-founders, including Delo, with various violations of American law. Delo and three others were charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement an adequate anti-money laundering program. The regulators alleged that the BitMEX trading platform was required to have registered aspects of its operations in the US and had failed to do so.

In March 2021, Delo traveled to the United States and surrendered himself to authorities in New York. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and was bailed on a $20 million bond before being allowed to return to the United Kingdom. On 24 February 2022, the Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Delo and his BitMEX cofounder had each pleaded guilty to one Bank Secrecy Act violation for "willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an anti-money laundering ('AML') program at BitMEX". Under the terms of their plea agreements, Delo and his co-founders each agreed to pay a $10 million civil monetary penalty to the CFTC. On 15 June 2022, Delo was sentenced to 30 months' probation, through 15 December 2024. On 29 March 2025, Delo and the other two BitMex founders were pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Philanthropy In October 2018, Delo gave £5 million to his Oxford alma mater Worcester College, endowing two teaching fellowships in perpetuity and becoming the youngest major donor in the College's history. At the same time, the College elected him into an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of his work in computing and his philanthropy. That month, Delo also became a member of Giving What We Can. In March 2020, Delo and Effective Giving funded a project led by the University of Oxford to survey of community-based infection of COVID-19 in the UK. Delo is associated with Mersenne.org and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a collaborative internet project to find Mersenne prime numbers. In 2020, he co-founded the Sheila Coates Foundation, which supports students with autism in Britain. In 2025, he funded the Ben Delo Fellowship at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In 2026, he gave £25 million to his autism charity the Sheila Coates Foundation,

In early 2026, Ben Delo reportedly donated £4m to Nigel Farage's Reform UK political party. This was a payment made before new regulations came into force on 25th March 2026 which capped donations from British citizens living overseas to £100,000.