Crypto billionaire’s £20m pledge ‘counters lacklustre science funding’
Ben Delo’s donation launches £60m London Institute for Mathematical Sciences fundraising drive
A cryptocurrency entrepreneur has pledged £20 million to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, as the organisation launches a £60m fundraising drive.
On 3 March, Lims—Britain’s independent institute for physics and maths—launched the fundraising drive and announced that Ben Delo, the billionaire co-founder of the world’s top platform for trading cryptocurrency, BitMex, had made the first pledge.
The fundraising drive aims to raise £60m to support “in perpetuity the work of its researchers”. Delo’s contribution is £10m, and up to £10m more, matching the sum of the next two largest gifts in the drive.
Thomas Fink, physicist and director of Lims, told Research Professional News that “the endowment will allow us to grow, to increase the areas of research that we can work on [and] allow us to be more ambitious”.
Fundamental science funding
On what prompted Delo to pledge the endowment, Fink said that amid a global push towards applied science in Europe, the UK and beyond, “we can’t trust governments to support basic science”.
Delo said he sees this endowment campaign as spearheading a movement to address the UK’s “lacklustre and inconsistent approach to scientific funding”.
He told RPN he would “like to see more funding for fundamental physics and mathematics”, as there “isn’t really this focus on fundamental science research”.
Delo added that he chose to make the latter half of his endowment dependent on further donations, as he is “very keen that [Lims] attracts other philanthropists to recognise the value of their work”.
Attracting foreign researchers
Fink said that “science is a global market, and most of our scientists come from different countries… [so] it’ll allow us to be more ambitious because they know that we have the security”. He added that the institute is planning to look at attracting scientists in the US to add to its team of academics, currently mostly from Ukraine and Russia.
“Given what’s going on in America, Britain can…shine brightly and push science forward and allow scientists to thrive,” he said.
Delo said his first contribution to Lims was two or three years ago, when he helped them buy some “very special chalk that comes from Japan” that is the “absolute best” for writing on blackboards. He added: “This caught my eye—that they care about the small details and giving researchers what they need.”
