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When Reform UK announced it would accept cryptocurrency donations through a payment processor called Radom, the decision was presented by the party as a breakthrough in the modernisation of political fundraising. But a Byline Times investigation reveals that Radom’s origins lie deep within the same Silicon Valley networks that have bankrolled and built the technological infrastructure for President Donald Trump’s political movement in the United States.
The company’s leadership emerged from corporations and venture capital firms deeply connected to some of Trump’s most prominent tech-world supporters. They include Peter Thiel, the billionaire who became MAGA’s chief evangelist in Silicon Valley with over a dozen allies in Trump’s second administration, and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s controlling shareholder described by a Trump advisor as a “shadow president” behind Trump himself. Byline Times can also confirm that Amazon, a major pro-Trump donor controlled by Jeff Bezos, provided seed-funding to Radom.
Radom had already exerted its influence in the UK Parliament years before Farage’s announcement, through an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) whose secretariat was run by an organisation advertising close relationships with pro-Trump tech giants including Oracle, Google and Microsoft.
Byline Times can reveal that the APPG’s secretariat had not only received funding from Oracle, but at the time was dominated by Conservative Party politicians – including current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.
From Oracle to Radom: Silicon Valley’s Republican Vanguard
Radom’s founder and chief executive, Christopher Wilson, cut his teeth as a software engineer at Oracle, the technology giant controlled by Larry Ellison. Wilson worked at Oracle’s Greater Dublin office from 2015 to 2017.
Oracle is not merely another Silicon Valley firm. Under Ellison’s stewardship, it has become synonymous with a particular strain of pro-Trump, anti-regulatory conservatism rare among major tech companies.
Ellison has hosted fundraisers for Trump, donated substantial sums to Republican Party causes, and positioned himself as one of the President’s most prominent backers. A decade ago, senior Oracle executives were hobnobbing with people in Trump’s orbit shortly before the 2016 election. Oracle CEO Safra Catz and chief lobbyist Ken Glueck went on to join the Trump administration’s transition teams.
Wilson’s tenure at Oracle does not necessarily mean he shares Ellison’s politics. But it situates Radom’s technical leadership within a corporate environment closely entangled with Trump-aligned networks and narratives throughout the MAGA era.
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The Thiel Connection
The Trump network connections deepen when examining Radom’s other co-founder. Mariel Yonnadam, the company’s former chief technology officer from 2022 until 2025, previously worked as a front-end engineer from 2018 to 2019 at Faire, a San Francisco-based marketplace that has become one of Silicon Valley’s most highly valued ‘unicorn’ start-ups.
Faire’s meteoric rise was powered by a roster of venture capital investors that reads like a who’s who of Trump-aligned tech finance. Among the most significant are Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, joined Trump’s presidential transition team, and has since incubated numerous hard-right political projects whilst providing intellectual scaffolding for tech nationalism. Another is Sequoia Capital, which in recent years has become increasingly associated with powerful Trump-supporting partners including Douglas Leone, a major Trump campaign donor, and Shaun Maguire, who has gained national prominence for aggressive pro-Trump advocacy.
Yonnadam went on to work as a software engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos, from 2019 to 2021. Amazon donated $1 million in cash for Trump’s inaugural fund in December 2024, and by August 2025 gave the Trump administration a $1 billion coupon to use their services for the federal government’s digital transformation and artificial intelligence capacity.
That year, Radom received seed-funding directly from Amazon through the AWS Activate programme, which provides cloud computing credits to start-ups. The first tranche of at least $30,000 was received through the programme’s exclusive ‘Portfolio tier’, facilitated by its venture capital backer Tykhe Block Ventures. The Portfolio tier places Radom within a broader ecosystem that includes major Silicon Valley investors – AWS Activate providers listed alongside Tykhe Block include Andreessen Horowitz and NVIDIA, both of which donated to Donald Trump.
This support from Amazon, one of the world’s largest technology companies, provided Radom with subsidised cloud infrastructure during its critical growth phase.
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Westminster Foothold
Radom’s presence in British politics predates its partnership with Reform UK by more than a year. In 2022, Wilson became an advisor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain.
Though APPGs have no formal legislative power, they give sponsoring companies and organisations significant influence and access. They allow private actors to shape MPs’ understanding of emerging sectors, often with minimal transparency about funding or commercial interests.
The Blockchain APPG’s secretariat was run by the Big Innovation Centre, a private think tank that publicly advertises an elite client and partner portfolio including Oracle – Wilson’s former employer – alongside other American Big Tech giants Google and Microsoft (both of which also donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration committee).
The centre does not publish descriptions of what these relationships entail, and did not respond to requests for information about its work. But it claims proximity to some of the world’s most powerful technology companies.
In 2019, the APPG register confirms, the Big Innovation Centre received a sum of £84,001-85,500 from a consortium of companies to act as the APPG on Blockchain’s group secretariat – one of the companies was Oracle. During this period, the APPG’s parliamentary membership was dominated by Conservative politicians, who included current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch as the group’s Treasurer, as well as then MP Damien Moore, Lord James Bridges of Headley (former Brexit Minister under Theresa May), Lord Chris Holmes of Richmond, and the late MP David Warburton.
Radom’s CEO Chris Wilson would join as an advisor three years later. By then, the Conservatives in the group were then MP Stephen Metcalf and Lord Lindesay-Bethune. The APPG appears to have been wound up in 2024.
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An Influence Infrastructure
Major technology companies, via policy intermediaries like the Big Innovation Centre, enjoyed access and influence onw questions of blockchain, digital assets and regulation – access that helped shape the environment in which crypto firms could establish legitimacy.
Wilson’s advisory position within this framework gave Radom credibility at a time when the cryptocurrency sector was struggling to establish itself in mainstream policymaking circles, along with direct access to MPs and peers engaging with blockchain regulation.
When Nigel Farage chose Radom as Reform UK’s crypto gateway, he connected his party to a firm whose leadership link directly back to some of the most politically consequential Silicon Valley firms backing Trump’s second term.
Crypto donations are not merely a technical innovation in political fundraising. They are also part of the structure of a political movement with deep roots in American right-wing networks – networks now extending their influence across the Atlantic.
Byline Times has previously exposed the foreign interests seemingly tied up with Reform UK’s crypto push, including the fact that the party’s biggest £9 million donor profits from ties to a pro-Kremlin platform that hosts a Russian intelligence-backed influence operation; and that Nigel Farage himself was paid by a Trump crypto advisor who collaborated with Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort, the convicted fraudster behind the Trump-Russia influence scandal. Manafort played a key role in crafting the American President’s entire crypto agenda, which Farage is now exporting to Britain.
The question facing British politics is not whether Radom or its founders hold particular political views. It is whether our regulatory and parliamentary systems are sufficiently transparent to scrutinise the activities and influence of foreign-aligned technology companies handed private access to our political institutions.
Radom, Reform UK, and the Big Innovation Centre did not respond to requests for comment.