Farage goes all in on Bitcoin

The Reform leader’s appearance at the Las Vegas crypto summit was smart politics.

Nigel Farage has had a paradoxical week. On Tuesday, he hit Labour from the left by calling for the two-child benefit cap to go. Forty-eight hours later, he flew to Las Vegas for a conference with Bitcoin magnates to tout his plans to lower taxes on cryptocurrency. All of which poses a question: is Farage for benefits or billionaires?

The Reform leader was more at home in Vegas than you might expect. One pundit – wearing bulky headphones like a UFC commentator – introduced Farage as the “the leading UK presidential candidate”. They clearly see him as one of their own. That fame is partly down to his fluency in the lexicon of the American right. He champions pensioners in London; in Las Vegas he attacks “globalists” and “big” government. Keir Starmer is branded a “socialist” – a villain for Maga, in other words – and the crux of politics becomes the decline in “our Judeo-Christian values”.

Such elasticity pays off. Farage basked in standing ovations, languidly sprawled in his chair. He has never been this certain in his domination of politics. Remember that on Brexit night he conceded defeat before the full results came in. Now, he mimics those presidential candidates who talk about “when” they will win the election. He detailed his career, tailored for his audience, with unusual pride: commodities trader, radio presenter, GB News host. “Frankly I think I’ve got much more experience than a bunch of Oxford-educated human rights lawyers to run the country,” he said.

Farage’s antennae are sharper than most. Where he leads, other politicians follow. He condemned China’s authoritarianism in January 2021, for instance, only for parliamentarians to declare a genocide against the Uyghurs later that year. He spent the pandemic filming boats of migrants crossing the Channel, a now hegemonic issue. He first went to a crypto conference three years ago in Amsterdam as Rishi Sunak laid out plans to make the UK a crypto hub.

But how many votes are in crypto? American politics usually grows rotten on its journey across the Atlantic. Ask jaundiced progressives how popular woke is now. Trump, who has his own memecoin, is his own repellent – America First, after all, means putting the US over allies. Farage had to distance himself from Elon Musk after X became a campaign headquarters for Britain’s race riots last summer. This year, tariffs plunged Trump’s approval ratings among British voters, even with those who support Reform. Yet Farage still calls Trump a “friend” and has set up a “Doge unit” to cut local government spending. He is riding two horses – and two countries – at once.

Farage’s gamble is that crypto is popular on the home front, not just with his American bros. The trick lies in the youth – something you couldn’t often say about the populist movement a few years ago. One YouGov survey last year found that 24 per cent of 18-34 year-olds own cryptocurrency, compared to 12 per cent of the population overall. “My message particularly to young people is help us to help you bring our country properly into the 21st Century,” Farage said.

What resolves Farage’s paradox is that cryptocurrency is a form of populist finance. It’s a decentralised currency often used to shield money from law enforcement, central banks and Wall Street. Eric Trump said at the conference that he “would love to see some of the big banks go extinct.” The last speaker of the day was Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a dark-web marketplace which used Bitcoin, who was arrested for drug trafficking offenses in 2013. Trump pardoned him two days after taking office. For its acolytes, cryptocurrency is the key to a new anti-establishment economics.

Farage sees himself as a marshal within this anti-system movement, standing against the globalist elite abroad, and the Conservative-Labour consensus at home. Like Trump – whose supporters range from Elon Musk to Steve Bannon, two men who resent each other’s views – Farage can glide between libertarianism and populism. He speaks the language of both and seems to think holding that coalition together is the route to No 10. That means calling for welfare one day, and hawking London as a crypto capital the next.