Benjamin Ella

After 17 seasons as a Soloist of The Royal Ballet in London—with roles created for him by some of the most celebrated choreographers alive, including Wayne McGregor, Crystal Pite, and Hofesh Shechter—Benjamin Ella retired in December 2025 and stepped into a new chapter rooted in choreography, faith, family, and sound money. His conversation with Bitcoin For The Arts founder Dion Wilson is one that could only happen between two professional dancers who found Bitcoin.

Born in Melbourne to former ballet dancers Christine Walsh and Ricardo Ella, Benjamin initially trained as a tennis player before falling in love with the theater at age 11. Obsessed with videos of Carlos Acosta by 13—watching them three times a day—he won the Alicia Markova Bursary at 15 and moved to London for a full scholarship at The Royal Ballet School. His roommate was Vadim Muntagirov, now a principal of The Royal Ballet.

Benjamin graduated injured—a stress fracture in his navicular that would plague him for three years, requiring surgery and two titanium pins. He nearly quit dancing in 2012. Director Dame Monica Mason’s support kept him in the company during the darkest period. “I really believe that if it was any other director I wouldn’t have made it,” he says. “It’s a miracle that I didn’t get fired.”

His extensive repertory at The Royal Ballet included Albrecht and pas de six in Giselle, The Prince and Benno in Swan Lake, Hans-Peter/Nutcracker in The Nutcracker, Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, and roles in The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He created roles in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern and Light of Passage, Wayne McGregor’s The Dante Project and Woolf Works, and Hofesh Shechter’s Untouchable, among others.

Benjamin’s Bitcoin journey began in 2015 with a small purchase he didn’t understand. He drifted into altcoins in 2017–2018. The real shift came during COVID, when several forces converged: he was serving as a union deputy, negotiating dancer contracts and seeing the economics of arts institutions from the inside; he was reading The Bitcoin Standardand watching Robert Breedlove’s “What is Money?” series with Michael Saylor; and governments were printing trillions.

“When you stumble onto something that’s true… you can’t unsee it.”

The tension was real. On one hand, he was developing libertarian leanings through Bitcoin. On the other, he was a union deputy negotiating for higher pay. “When I first went in as a union representative I was like, ‘This is unfair, we should be getting more money.’ Then as you actually get to understand the management side… I’m like, okay, money doesn’t work like that.”

His parents’ example shaped his understanding long before Bitcoin. They ran the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet—now a training program operating in 14 countries—without government grants, without boards telling them what to do. “They were very much like: we’d rather it be a little bit more difficult but we have control. We have freedom.”

Then Bitcoin led him somewhere unexpected: to Christianity. “It was funnily enough the Bitcoin rabbit hole that got me interested in Christianity,” he says. The deeper he went into the Bible, the more it deepened his convictions on Bitcoin.

“Proverbs 11:1—The Lord detests dishonest weights and scales. That’s what money printing is. Dishonest scales and weights. I see Bitcoin as even weights and scales. Moral money.”

Benjamin revealed that Arts Council funding for The Royal Ballet has dropped from over 50% to just 19%—and it’s still falling. The building needs complete refurbishment. “The boilers are falling apart,” he says. The old funding model is breaking in real time.

His vision for the future includes a choreography studio in London running on a Bitcoin standard, a Bitcoin treasury for his church, and expanding his parents’ ballet training program with sound money at the foundation. He also tried to orange-pill The Royal Ballet’s administration—twice. It didn’t work. But he’s playing the long game.

For young dancers curious about Bitcoin, his advice is clear: “ReadThe Bitcoin Standard. Buy a tiny bit of Bitcoin. Join a Bitcoin-only meetup. Don’t ignore it at your own peril. This is not going away.”

When asked what a $500–$2,000 Bitcoin micro-grant from BFTA would unlock, Benjamin said he and his wife—who both choreograph—would use it to finally launch a collaborative project: hiring a studio, bringing in dancers, and getting it filmed. “Everything costs money,” he says. “That grant would be: okay, let’s actually make steps to make this piece happen.”

In Benjamin Ella, Bitcoin For The Arts finds something rare: a classical artist at the highest level who sees Bitcoin not as speculation but as moral money—even weights and scales in a world of dishonest ones. His story bridges the traditional arts establishment and the sovereign renaissance, proving that you can spend 17 years inside one of the most prestigious institutions in the world and still recognize that the system needs to change.