# Ben Delo

Ben Delo (/diːloʊ/, 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.

## Early life and education

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

Delo began his career as a software engineer at IBM, where he was named as an inventor on several patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Intellectual Property Office. 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.
In 2014, Delo met Arthur Hayes and Sam Reed, and they co-founded BitMEX, a cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform. 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."

## 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 pled 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 16 June 2022, Delo was sentenced to 30 months' probation.

## 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. In April 2019, Delo signed the Giving Pledge, announcing his intention to give away at least half of his wealth during his lifetime being inspired by the philosophy of effective altruism. 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 2023, he established the Ben Delo Commonwealth Leadership Programme, a scholarship initiative for postgraduate studies at King's College London.