How Reform fares on Thursday will also determine the Conservatives fate
They came in their droves: thousands of Reform supporters poured into a vast hall in a Birmingham conference centre on Sunday to hear Nigel Farage.
His backers brought with them Union Jacks, and brandished Reform placards. There were even one or two red baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make Britain Great Again”, which seemed fitting for an event that felt quite Trumpian in style and tone.
Mr Farage came onto the stage to pounding music, smoke machines, fireworks, and a sea of “it’s time for Reform” placards to a 5,000-strong crowd with a speech that spoke about how Britain was broken and it was time for Reform.
He said his party would be the “leading voice of opposition” as he attacked ‘the establishment’ in all its guises, from the Conservative Party to Labour, the BBC, and Channel 4 to the Governor of the Bank of England.
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While detractors describe Mr Farage’s platform as a type of dog-whistle politics that does little but to stoke grievances and division, there is an audience for him and his policies that politicians in larger parties should ignore at their peril.
When I spoke to many people in the hall afterwards, they were overwhelmingly former Conservative voters disillusioned with their old party.
One woman, who had travelled over from Hull for the rally told me she thought there were a lot of “silent people who may be frightened to say they are voting Reform”.
“I think it’s going to be shock,” she said.
The crowd in Birmingham. Pic: Reuters
2024 is the election for ‘the other parties’
The rise of the ‘other’ parties is a clear theme of this election campaign as the Liberal Democrats, who won just 11 seats back in 2019, now eye getting back to the levels of seats they enjoyed – in the 1940s or 1950s – before it was wiped out in 2015 on the back of the coalition years.
Nigel Farage’s Reform, meanwhile, is on 16.2% in our Sky News poll tracker, just behind the Tories on 20%.
Earlier this month, the Conservatives fell behind Reform UK for the first time in a national poll, leaving the Tories gripped by panic and in despair.
Mr Farage likes to make the argument that Labour could be heading to a landslide on a lower voter share.
Recent analysis in the Financial Times suggested Labour could win a record 450 seats – about 70% – on just 41% of the votes, lower than the figure Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in 2017, while the Lib Dems could pick up 50 seats with a lower share of the vote than Reform with just a few seats at best. If it turns out anything like this, prepare for plenty of noise from Mr Farage.
Whether undecided voters or those leaning to Reform stick with them on Thursday is a big unknown of this election. Tories are nervous, knowing that big Reform votes piling up in their constituencies could cost them their seat.
In 2019, the majority of Conservatives did not have a threat from the right, as the Brexit Party stood down candidates with a Brexit-backing Conservative candidate. They stood but 275 or 632 seats.
This time around, Reform is everywhere and no one feels safe: one poll put James Cleverly’s Braintree constituency, supposedly the 19th safest Conservative seat, on a knife edge as Reform clocks up an estimated 22% vote share in his Essex constituency.
Pic: Reuters
Tories in all-out war
The Conservatives, who began this campaign trying not to get into a fight with Mr Farage (perhaps for fear of further alienating their traditional voters) are now at all-out war as they try to salvage as many seats as they can.
On Sunday the party said if “just 130,000 voters currently considering a vote for Reform or the Lib Dems voted Conservative, it would be enough to stop Labour’s supermajority”.
The prime minister, meanwhile, has become increasingly vocal in his criticisms of Reform and Mr Farage as the party looks for a way to pull voters back.
Mr Sunak has been vocal in his criticism of Mr Farage as a “Putin appeaser” after the Reform leader suggested Ukraine enter peace talks – something which Ukraine has emphatically ruled out unless Russia retreats from its territory.
The prime minister also spoke of his “anger and hurt” over revelations – contested by Reform – in a Channel 4 undercover report of a Reform canvasser calling Mr Sunak a “f****** P***”.
This, combined with a Reform organiser making homophobic remarks and candidates being suspended for racist, antisemitic and sexist views has caused difficulties for Mr Farage in recent days.
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Sunak ‘hurt’ over Reform race row
Tensions around Farage starting to show
In our interview in Birmingham on Sunday, some of those tensions were beginning to show.
For a start, the politician who had appeared with right-wing Tories such as potential future leader Dame Priti Patel at the Conservative Party conference last October, and openly toyed about returning to the fold, now ruled out any sort of tie-up.
Having spoken but a month ago about a reverse takeover of the Tories and refusing to rule out one day rejoining the party, on Sunday he was clear he would not rejoin, and wanted nothing to do with the Conservatives.
Pic: Reuters
It comes after a clutch of senior figures, including Dame Priti, indicated that Mr Farage would now not be welcomed back into the party in the wake of the backlash over his claim the West provoked Russia to invade Ukraine and the racism row engulfing Reform.
He equally was more equivocal than he had been about Andrew Tate in the past, making it clear to me that he “disavowed’ him, and was also highly critical of Reform events organiser George James who made homophobic remarks, saying he was “furious” when he saw the footage (also in the Channel 4 report) of Mr James describing the Pride flag as “degenerate” and criticising the police for displaying the flag.
“They should be out catching the n***** not promoting the f******”,” he said in the report.
Mr Farage said Mr James was “crass, drunken, rude and wrong” and told me he had been asked to remove his membership. But he also said he was “down a few drinks” explaining: “We could all say silly things when we’re a bit drunk.”
When I asked him if people really say things like this when they are drunk, Mr Farage said: “People say all sorts of things when they’re drunk and often don’t remember. But it was awful.”
So awful that one Reform candidate announced on Sunday evening they were standing down and would instead back their local Conservative in the constituency of Erewash.
The question for Reform is whether their potential voters, looking at some of the controversy surrounding the party, decide it’s not for them after all.
What is absolutely clear is Reform’s performance will help determine that of the Conservatives on Thursday night as the election results come in.
If he’s successful, Mr Farage will be heading for parliament, not only giving him a bigger national platform but a democratic mandate. That spells trouble for a Conservative party already in turmoil.
A group of investors has filed a class-action lawsuit against decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Meteora, alleging the firm was involved in manipulating the launch and market price of the M3M3 token.
In an amended complaint filed on April 21 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the plaintiffs allege that venture capital firm Kelsier Labs, Meteora, and four current or former executives “intentionally misrepresented” information in the M3M3 launch in December 2024.
The investors claimed that they suffered at least $69 million in losses between December 2024 and February 2025 after the parties presented “trusted leaders in the Solana ecosystem” as being behind the token launch, rather than a “blatant fraud” in which sales were manipulated to artificially inflate the price.
“This artificially-inflated valuation communicated highly misleading information to non-insider investors, who reasonably relied on Defendants’ representations that the $M3M3 launch was fully accessible to the public and conducted in a transparent manner fair to non-insider investors, and thus reasonably relied on $M3M3 market price as a meaningful measure of its value,” the complaint reads. “The post-launch price spike also served to corroborate Defendants’ aggressively-marketed, but misleading, assertions that $M3M3 had intrinsic value and a comparatively low risk profile.”
The lawsuit is one of many involving different crypto firms that have alleged fraud through violations of US securities laws. Though the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), under acting chair Mark Uyeda since US President Donald Trump took office, has scaled back or dismissed many enforcement actions involving digital assets, the agency said in February it still intended to pursue cases against fraudulent token projects.
The investors added:
“Together, Defendants designed the $M3M3 Token and planned its launch on Meteora in a manner intended to illicitly enrich themselves at the expense of the unsuspecting investing public.”
Related: Meteora says co-founder’s X account hacked after ‘parasitic’ memecoin post
Memecoins in the Solana ecosystem
Meteora has been tied to the launch of several high-profile yet controversial tokens, including those for Trump (TRUMP), his wife Melania (MELANIA), Libra (LIBRA), and online influencer Haliey Welch (HAWK).
According to the lawsuit, the firm “purported to offer a comprehensive solution to the problems in the memecoin investment market” with the launch of M3M3. The defendants in the case allegedly attempted to distinguish the token from other notable memecoins by highlighting the “legitimacy and trustworthiness” through the involvement of Meteora co-founder Ben Chow and the platform.
Kelsier Ventures, KIP Protocol, and Meteora face a similar class-action lawsuit filed in New York in March over LIBRA allegedly being launched in a “deceptive, manipulative and fundamentally unfair” manner. Argentine President Javier Milei briefly promoted the token over social media after his sister reportedly received payments from the project.
Magazine: Memecoin degeneracy is funding groundbreaking anti-aging research
More than 70 cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are slated for review by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this year. According to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas, the list includes proposed ETFs holding a range of assets, from altcoins to memecoins to derivatives instruments.
“Everything from XRP, Litecoin and Solana to Penguins, Doge and 2x Melania and everything in between,” Balchunas said in an April 21 post on the X platform. “Gonna be a wild year.”
Related: ARK adds staked Solana to two tech ETFs
Uncertain institutional demand
The planned funds listings come as institutional investors turn increasingly bullish on crypto as an asset class.
Upward of 80% of institutions say they plan to increase allocations to crypto in 2025, according to a March report by Coinbase and EY-Parthenon.
However, analysts caution that just because ETFs are approved for US listings doesn’t guarantee widespread adoption, especially for funds holding more obscure alternative cryptocurrencies.
“Having your coin get ETF-ized is like being in a band and getting your songs added to all the music streaming services,” Balchunas said.
“Doesn’t guarantee listens but it puts your music where the vast majority of the listeners are.”
Sygnum Bank’s research head, Katalin Tischhauser, told Cointelegraph she expects altcoin ETFs to see cumulative inflows of several hundred million to $1 billion, far less than spot Bitcoin funds.
Funds holding Bitcoin (BTC) — the first spot cryptocurrency approved for listing in a US ETF wrapper — attracted upward of $100 billion in net assets last year.
However, ETFs using options and other derivatives to provide structured exposure to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether might see more institutional uptake, analysts said.
Options on spot cryptocurrencies unlock numerous potential portfolio strategies for investors and could potentially catalyze “explosive” price upside for digital assets such as Bitcoin, Jeff Park, Bitwise Invest’s head of alpha strategies, said in September.
Options are contracts granting the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a certain price.
On April 21, ARK Invest added exposure to staked Solana (SOL) to two of its existing ETFs. The asset manager said it marks the first time spot SOL has been available to US investors in an ETF.
Magazine: ‘Bitcoin layer 2s’ aren’t really L2s at all: Here’s why that matters
New filings from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reveal that several cryptocurrency firms and their executives made significant contributions to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration fund after the results of the 2024 election.
According to FEC filings made public on April 20 by the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams donated more than $245,000, Solana Labs donated $1 million, and software firm Consensys sent $100,000 in January 2025 to support the then-president-elect’s inauguration. Many major crypto firms had previously announced their support of Trump through donations to the inaugural fund, including Coinbase, Ripple Labs, Kraken, Ondo Finance, and Robinhood.
Altogether, the fund reported more than $239 million in net donations between Nov. 15 and April 20 from companies and individuals. These included $1 million from McDonald’s, $1 million from Meta, $1 million from Apple CEO Tim Cook, $1 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and various contributions from Delta Air Lines, ExxonMobil, FedEx, Nvidia, PayPal, Target, and Coca-Cola.
Since Trump took office on Jan. 20 and appointed Mark Uyeda as acting chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency has dropped multiple investigations and enforcement actions against crypto firms, including those that donated to the president’s 2024 campaign or inauguration fund. In February, Uniswap reported that the SEC had dropped its probe into the firm, and Consensys founder Joseph Lubin said the agency had agreed to end a separate lawsuit.
Memecoins, stablecoin issuers, and future elections
Trump’s memecoin, launched on Jan. 17 on the Solana blockchain — along with his wife Melania’s, which was available a few days later — has many in the crypto industry and the US government questioning the president about conflicts of interest by capitalizing on his position. The president’s family is also behind the launch of World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm responsible for a US dollar-pegged stablecoin at a time when lawmakers are considering legislation to regulate the technology.
In addition to the Consensys case, the SEC said it intended to drop enforcement actions or investigations into Ripple, Kraken, Robinhood and Coinbase. The three firms donated a combined $9 million to the inauguration fund.
Related: Trump’s next crypto play will be Monopoly-style game — Report
The 2024 US election cycle saw crypto-backed political action committees (PACs) spending more than $131 million to influence races in crucial congressional districts. The Fairshake PAC has already said it had more than $100 million available, in part from contributions from Coinbase and Ripple, to spend on the 2026 midterms.
Magazine: Trump’s crypto ventures raise conflict of interest, insider trading questions
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