Part IThe Story
A Tenth of the Offer
On the night of July 13, 2017, Changpeng Zhao kept calling.
He had a launch in the morning. Binance existed as a white paper, a matching engine and a token called BNB that nobody could trade yet. The woman he was calling had been helping him draft that white paper as a consultant. She held a vice presidency at a Beijing video company and earned more than he could pay her. His pitch, as she later reconstructed it for the Hong Kong publication Forkast, had nothing to do with destiny. It was a sum.
"We're going online tomorrow," Zhao told her, "and the price of BNB might increase by 10 times, and then my offer to you will be a tenth as it was. You have to decide now if you are joining us or not."
Most job offers grow more valuable if the company succeeds. This one was built to shrink. Equity normally rewards patience, but Zhao had denominated his offer so that her caution became the expense. If she waited a day to see whether the exchange worked, she would pay for the information at a rate of ninety percent. In another telling she gave years later, she set the hour of her answer at three or four in the morning, "just an offer over the phone." She also said she had told him "that I didn't want his company to be successful only in China, but that I wanted a bigger challenge."
"And I said yes," Yi He told Forkast.
The paperwork records something less cinematic. She formally joined on August 8, 2017, nearly four weeks after launch. One account says she agreed at first to work for free. She marked the move by saying she would "start again at age 30." The yes and the arrival do not line up neatly, and the gap is typical of her record. Most of what is known about Yi He comes from interviews she gave in Chinese, published in English, sometimes through two translators, and then summarized by crypto trade sites that disagree with one another about her birthday. The broad outline is not disputed. The exchange she joined that night became the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world within about five months. Six years later it pleaded guilty to federal crimes in the United States and paid $4.3 billion. The man who made the phone call went to a federal prison in California, was released, and was pardoned by an American president who later said he had "no idea" who Zhao was.
On December 3, 2025, the woman who answered the phone became co-chief executive of the company.
Her announcement on X kept the title she had always preferred: "Still the same Chief Customer Service Officer, at your service." She has spent her career answering calls, many of them in the middle of the night. One week into the new job, a call went out in her name, and it was not her on the line.
By the Numbers
Yi He and the Exchange She Helped Build
≥10%Her reported stake in Binance's Cayman Islands holding company (WSJ)
$7.5BAssets under Binance Labs when she took charge in August 2022
310M+Registered Binance users as of May 2026
$34TTrading volume processed on Binance in 2025
$4.3BPenalty in Binance's November 2023 U.S. guilty plea
2,000+Staff across HR, marketing, comms, and support under her as co-CEO
#64Fortune Most Powerful Women 2026, the first crypto-native executive on the list
Water From the Well
She was born He Ying in 1986 in rural Sichuan. Some sources place her in Yibin, a prefecture-level city on the upper Yangtze. Others say only "a small village." She has used the second description herself: "I'm from a very small village and a very poor family." Both of her parents taught school. In the 1980s she walked to a well for water, and some nights the house was lit by kerosene lamps. Her father died when she was nine.
Before he died, he gave her two things. One was high academic expectations. The other was something less practical and more revealing. "My father not only placed high requirements on my academic performance," she recalled, "but also sent me to training school to study ink wash painting." Her parents borrowed money to pay for her education, which she has called unusual where she grew up. Most students in her village left school by sixteen to work in factories. She was not willing to wait her turn. She says she demanded to start school at four. Her Wikipedia entry says five, and in either version she finished near the top of her class.
Years later, on a Chinese podcast called Money-Making Girls, she described the question that formed her: "Why is it that only city kids can like beautiful things, like flowers and plants? Why can't I?" The line is close to a slogan, and she does not mind slogans. It also contains a grievance that business profiles tend to soften. Her complaint was never that the village was poor. It was that the village was supposed to want less. Her answer was to want more, plainly and without apology. "I feel that Chinese people are often quite shy about using the word 'ambition,'" she said at a 2026 AMA in Hong Kong. "Wanting to succeed and desiring a better life is never something to be ashamed of."
Her first paid work was selling her voice. At sixteen she handed out free samples of a new soft drink in front of a supermarket. "It was a hard job," she said later, "and all the talking and hawking led to a hoarse voice." Within two months, by her account, she was the store's top promoter. Then she managed a bedding shop for two months. The details are small, but they repeat through her career. She worked close to the customer, she was measured on volume, and she had a product she had not made and had to persuade strangers to try for nothing.
In 2006 she went to Beijing and enrolled in an in-service master's program in counseling psychology. She earned a national psychological counselor certificate. In 2007 she worked as an assistant counselor at a clinic affiliated with the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The hours were long. She did not finish the degree. She concluded that the market for therapy in China was too small and left. She spent two years as a class adviser at a private arts college in Lijiang, the old town in Yunnan that tourists know for its canals.
Later, whether by trade publications or by her own framing, this period was turned into preparation: psychology taught her user behavior, teaching taught her patience. That may be true. It is just as plausible that she was a talented young woman without connections, moving between the jobs available to her and leaving each when it got smaller than she was. On the podcast she put it in a sentence that reads almost like a counseling note: "A person doesn't exist in isolation. You ultimately discover who you are through every collision with the world."
The Host Who Left the Studio
Television found her more or less by accident. A producer friend suggested she try hosting. One profile from a Chinese crypto media site, the kind that publishes a founder's anecdotes reverently, says she won the job with an argument a CFO would admire: her psychology background meant she could connect with people, and she had studied makeup, "so I'll save the team a makeup artist's expense. I'm not asking for a high salary, just a chance to prove myself."
From 2012 to 2014 she hosted travel programs on Travel Satellite TV, including Beautiful Destination (美丽目的地) and As Far as You Go (有多远走多远), along with Beijing Discovery (北京新发现) on Beijing Television. The same hagiographic source says that during one shoot in Qinghai she lost contact with her crew and walked out of the mountains alone. True or not, the image fits the rest of her biography: someone on camera discovers the crew has gone and keeps moving.
She did not enjoy fame for long, because she could see what was happening to the medium. "[Hosting TV shows] may be a job that many people dream of," she said, "but I felt anxious because I could see that the influence of the TV industry had gradually been eroded by the internet." She was in her mid-twenties, had a career millions of Chinese women would have wanted, and was already reading it as an obsolete asset.
In 2013 she encountered Bitcoin. "It was overwhelmingly enlightening," she said. "I was resolute in quitting my job as a television anchor and entering the blockchain industry." In other interviews she adds a philosophical layer. Bitcoin made her ask "what money really is." She came to see it as a trust network built on global consensus instead of a currency backed by national credit. "I questioned the nature of money and read many books but found no answers," she told one interviewer. "In 2013, I first learned about Bitcoin and saw a real path that could overcome global economic barriers."
Crypto conversion stories tend to sound alike, and hers is no exception. Its timing is the interesting part. She arrived in Bitcoin from the most centralized medium in China, the broadcast studio, where one camera reaches millions and nobody answers back. She went into a technology whose believers said it had no center. Then she spent the next ten years building one of the most centralized institutions in the industry: an exchange with no headquarters, one founder as its public face, and a small secretive team that decided what millions of users could buy.
The Hire That Ran the Other Way
The usual story of Binance has a man who brought a woman into crypto. The record shows the reverse.
In March 2014 she joined OKCoin, an early Beijing exchange run by Star Xu, as vice president. Depending on the source, she ran marketing, user operations, or both. Whether she was a co-founder is disputed. Her own interviews and several profiles call her one. Wikipedia says she "joined." The Korean outlet Blockmedia listed the co-founders as Xu Mingxing, Changpeng Zhao and He Yi, which cannot be correct as a description of the founding, since Zhao arrived later. Partly because of her, the title "co-founder" moves loosely through the record, attaching to people after the fact as success makes it worth claiming.
What she did at OKCoin is better documented. She put an OKCoin billboard in Times Square, a Chinese exchange advertising itself in a country where Chinese exchanges would later be unwelcome. She said she helped the platform take about 60 percent of mainland China's market during a bear market. Chinese crypto circles began calling her the "First Sister of the Coin Circle." In a February 2015 interview with the Chinese edition of Marie Claire, she stated her purpose with a host's directness: "I hope to spread Bitcoin to the masses."
In the spring of 2014 she went to a blockchain conference and watched a programmer give a talk. He was Changpeng Zhao: born in 1977 in Ganyu, Jiangsu, the son of a university instructor who was branded a "pro-bourgeois intellect" and exiled to the countryside shortly after the boy was born. The family left China for Vancouver in 1989, after Tiananmen, when Zhao was twelve. As a teenager he worked at a McDonald's and a gas station to help support them. He studied computer science at McGill, wrote order-matching software for a Tokyo Stock Exchange subcontractor, spent four years building futures trading systems at Bloomberg Tradebook, and moved to Shanghai in 2005 to start a high-frequency trading company. In 2013, over a poker game, Bobby Lee advised him to put 10 percent of his money into Bitcoin. Zhao sold his Shanghai apartment and put in everything.
Both were children of teachers, and both had fathers removed from their lives early, one by politics and one by death. When they met, he had just made the largest bet of his life on something most people thought was a joke.
"He was the first guy who made me feel like he had the skills to transfer difficult technology into simple language that people could understand," she said. Years later, in a letter to a federal judge, she remembered more: "At that time, he had just sold his house to buy Bitcoin. His assets plummeted due to falling prices, but this did not shake his obsession with the technology."
She recruited him as OKCoin's chief technology officer. It may be the most consequential hire in the history of the industry, and the person who made it was a former travel-show host.
It lasted less than a year. "The differences in opinions and values between the founder and the cofounder appeared as the company developed rapidly," she told Forkast. "So CZ and I left." She has been unusually unwilling to say more. "I don't want to talk too much about OkCoin," she told a London interviewer in 2022. "Sometimes at the beginning the industry is really small so you don't have too much choice."
One OKCoin story survived and she tells it readily. During another market downturn, an employee was diagnosed with leukemia and colleagues organized a fundraiser. She and Zhao turned the impulse into a charity project, Caring BTC, which later became Binance Charity. In her account, the institution's conscience came out of the same bad market as its founding partnership.
Another 2015 scene belongs here. On a Chinese reality television show, three crypto executives performed a number called the "Twisting Goat Song" in onesies with goat horns and white bonnets. One of them was Justin Sun, who would found TRON. According to DL News, he had obviously not rehearsed and kept copying the woman next to him, who hit every step and got the applause. She was the professional on that stage. The others were founders imitating her.
Live, From Somewhere Else
After OKCoin, Zhao started a cloud software company called Bijie Technology. In December 2015, Yi He joined Yixia Technology in Beijing as vice president. Yixia made mobile video apps: Miaopai (秒拍) for short clips, Xiaokaxiu (小咖秀) for lip-sync, and Yizhibo (一直播), a live-streaming platform she helped launch, which later became part of Weibo's world.
This is the least examined part of her career and probably the most useful one for understanding the rest. Chinese live-streaming in 2016 was a ruthless attention market with platforms competing for the same faces and hours. She arranged a widely watched stream with the South Korean actor Song Joong-ki, who was then at the peak of his fame across Asia. Accounts credit her branding work with helping push Yixia's valuation to around $3 billion. One English-language interview, in what looks like a slip of the pen, gave the figure as "USD 5 million," a 600-fold error that went uncorrected online, which is common for her press.
What she learned at Yixia is not on a résumé, but it can be read from what she did afterward. Users do not distinguish between a product and the person who talks to them about it. A community can be enlisted to make the content. Attention depends on timing more than quality. When she left in mid-2017, she wrote on her blog: "This world is crazier than you think, and I am part of this crazy world. Therefore, I would like to go back to my battlefield, join Binance, in order to complete my mission."
She had left crypto during a downturn and returned at the start of the 2017 ICO boom, with two years of training in a harder attention market than the one she was entering.
Coin, Safety
The Chinese name for Binance, 币安, is hers. 币 means coin, crypto, currency. 安 means safety, peace, security. The English name sounds like a fintech startup. The Chinese name reads more like a promise or a reassurance to a nervous depositor: your coin, safe.
In 2017, Chinese retail investors had good reasons to doubt any such promise. That September, Beijing cracked down on crypto trading, and Binance moved its operations out of the mainland. She had helped rewrite parts of the white paper for a $15 million ICO. Now she had a product with nowhere to live and a founder whose Chinese face made Western regulators suspicious and whose Canadian passport made Chinese regulators ambivalent. Zhao would later complain, in a line that became a headline, "Binance isn't a Chinese firm. Have to repeat it cause I look Chinese."
She ran marketing, growth and user operations. He ran technology. Her own summary is breathless: "An hour in the crypto world was worth a year in the law of the jungle in the real world." On December 18, 2017, five months after launch, Binance handled about $3 billion in trading volume in one day and became the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. In January 2018, Bloomberg reported that it had added 240,000 users in a single hour. A small team was running at a scale that should have broken it, and her response was to put everyone on the phones.
The rule is well documented: everyone hired at Binance, regardless of seniority, spends their first weeks on the front line of customer service, answering tickets. She treated it as doctrine rather than gesture. She also built a volunteer corps of "Binance Angels," hundreds of unpaid enthusiasts who handled user questions and made, in her words, "many of the funny / interesting / beautiful images and videos of Binance which are very popular online." She credited the climb to number one to "true commitment to putting our users first."
— Changpeng Zhao, to ForkLogYi He is probably the strongest marketer I know. I think she is among the top ten specialists in China, and believe me, China is an ultra-competitive market.
The cynical reading is easy: it was a growth playbook dressed up as service, free labor described as community. The cynical reading is incomplete. She has described hunting down a university student's $500 sent to the wrong wallet, normally an unrecoverable loss, and remembers him telling her, "It's a small figure for you but everything to me." She also points to the SAFU fund, which she helped establish, an emergency reserve whose name is crypto slang for "safe." On May 7, 2019, hackers took 7,000 bitcoin, about $40 million, from Binance. The exchange froze transactions for a week and covered user losses from that reserve. Few institutions in crypto had made that kind of promise. Binance kept it.
Both readings hold. She designed a system to be close to customers, and closeness is how you sell to them. The same Telegram channel that carries a complaint carries the next listing. The girl handing out free soda knew that samples are not charity, and also that someone holding a free can sometimes needs help with the tab.
She has a phrase for the persona: Chief Customer Service Officer. She used it long before she adopted it formally. "I do not really call myself CMO," she told Bitcoin Addict Thailand in 2022. "I always call myself Chief Customer Service Officer." At Binance's fifth-anniversary event she added a detail that makes the title stranger: "Everyone is a bit confused about who I am and what I do at Binance. I'm Binance's co-founder, but usually just call me chief of customer service, even though I don't really manage the customer service team."
So the title was not a job. It was a position: close to the user, below the user, at their service. That position also happens to be very hard to subpoena.
The Room Where Tokens Are Born
The customer service persona was public. The power was somewhere else.
In June 2023, Bloomberg reported that she ran both Binance's investment arm and the team that decided which tokens Binance would list. Bloomberg called the listing team "so secretive that few insiders even know its members." For a crypto project, a Binance listing could mean the difference between obscurity and a multibillion-dollar market cap. Whoever controlled that door controlled an enormous flow of value. Jeff John Roberts at Fortune noted that this was "an aspect of Binance's business the company never talks about, and that likely creates enormous revenue in the form of projects paying for exposure." He added, with the frustration of a reporter who has found a locked room: "Alas, the Bloomberg profile doesn't explore the topic further."
In August 2022, during what the industry called crypto winter, she was named head of Binance Labs, the venture arm. Binance said it had $7.5 billion under management across more than 200 projects and a 2,100 percent return since 2018. Its portfolio included Axie Infinity, Polygon, The Sandbox and STEPN. It had also invested in Terraform Labs, maker of Luna and TerraUSD, contributing $3 million to a $32 million round in 2018. That May, both tokens had gone to almost nothing. Zhao called it "the whole situation was a disaster."
She was thirty-five or thirty-six, depending on whose count you use, and she told reporters that this was the moment to be bold. "In a bear market, I think we should make investments more aggressively, but not just for the sake of investing," she told Forkast. Some of the fund's limited partners had pushed her to invest more and faster. "I've told them not to be nervous." She would filter out "copycat" projects. In the same summer, Sam Bankman-Fried was telling Fortune that FTX's mandate was to make deals "kind of reasonable, maybe even a little bad, but not horrific." She told Bloomberg Binance "can't buy something just for the sake of buying it." Within four months one of those two exchanges no longer existed.
Later the fund was spun out and renamed YZi Labs, described as a venture firm and family office associated with Zhao that invests in Web3, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. By one 2025 account it managed more than $10 billion. The family office side was not hidden. Protos, a crypto news site that is hostile to Binance, described Zhao as someone who "co-manages funds of a family office with her."
Not every idea was disciplined. On December 24, 2023, The Wall Street Journal published a portrait of her under the headline "The Crypto Queen Pulling the Strings at Binance." It reported that she held at least 10 percent of a Cayman Islands holding company associated with Binance, and that with Zhao facing sentencing she was effectively the largest shareholder present. It described projects that read like ambition outrunning judgment. One was a Netflix-style studio meant to produce a Marvel-style cinematic universe with early Binance employees as the heroes. It was dropped. Another was Build the Block, a Shark Tank-style show where crypto founders pitched for investment as computer-generated avatars, billed as the first metaverse reality show. She was a guest judge on the first episode. The show struggled, and a producer assigned to it was laid off.
One item was more serious. According to the Journal, during 2022 she pushed a plan to sell digital identities from Palau to outsiders for $248, a way to give people in countries where Binance was restricted access to its platform. Warnings about reputational and legal risk did not stop her, and the paper reported that one aim was a backdoor for Chinese users. Binance later said it did not proceed with any partnership after due diligence.
The Palau plan was not a side project. It was the same idea as the customer service doctrine, applied at the level of geography. Wherever the user is, she would reach them, including where governments had decided the user should not be reached. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that material in the Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Binance showed Zhao naming her as one of the people involved in a process that would let American users get around the exchange's restrictions. When Bloomberg asked whether market makers tied to Zhao had traded with U.S. firms and inflated volumes, as the SEC alleged, she did not comment.
Comrade, Roommate, Mother of Three
Romance among powerful people at crypto exchanges had a bad reputation by 2023, because of FTX. Caroline Ellison, a Stanford-educated quant who ran Sam Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research and was intermittently his girlfriend, was by then cooperating with prosecutors in what Fortune called "likely a bid to stay out of prison." Bankman-Fried, the child of two Stanford law professors, was living in his parents' house on campus awaiting trial. The comparison to Yi He was obvious, and reporters made it.
She rejected it in sentences that sound like they were drafted for exactly that question.
— Yi He, to Bloomberg, June 2023There is a significant distinction here: Caroline was an employee, whereas I am a partner. The relationship between cofounders requires much more than what a dating relationship does. A cofounder relationship is about comradeship, a dating relationship is about chemistry.
She went further: "The former is based on shared beliefs and goes beyond gender, the latter is based on physical attraction and selfish desires." In the same Bloomberg interviews she described Zhao as "a comrade, and also like a college roommate," and said the two of them led separate parts of the company. Bloomberg pointed out the obvious conflict-of-interest concerns. A Fortune newsletter, enjoying itself, said "the relationship between Zhao and He is, well, complicated."
The facts are not especially complicated. In April 2023 Fortune reported that Zhao had decided "to become a parent with Binance cofounder Yi He," and that they had two toddlers. When she wrote to the federal judge in Seattle before his sentencing a year later, she introduced herself as his business partner and "the mother of his three children." In 2022 she had told Forkast, from Singapore, that she was a work-from-home mother of a two-year-old who skipped lunch to take a 90-minute online English class. In a 2023 hearing, the judge, Richard Jones, refused Zhao's request to travel abroad. His lawyers suggested the request involved "medical information regarding Mr. Zhao's child." The court sealed the details.
Hers was one of 161 letters asking the court for leniency. Another came from Zhao's sister, Jessica, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley. Yi He's letter was written in Chinese, and it argues in a way she rarely does in public. It portrays Zhao as an idealist with a simple life: inexpensive clothes from Amazon, a scooter to meetings, a six-seat Toyota van. It credits him with helping more than 180,000 users recover over $441 million in assets they had sent to the wrong place. It recalls a Chinese fraud victim whose stolen funds Binance froze before law enforcement asked, until the scammer returned the money. It dismisses former employees who had spoken to the press as people "accustomed to an elitist corporate environment," who had left "indignantly and make false accusations in the media."
Then it explains the crime. Zhao's main mistake, she wrote, was ignorance: "Since it was a startup without specialists, the founding team members had no legal education, and most of the early leaders, except for CZ, could not even read English."
As a plea for mercy, this is a remarkable sentence. It is also an indictment of the company's founding structure. The one person who could read the laws of the country that would eventually prosecute them was the man who had broken them. In a single clause she put her own limitations and her team's into the court record as the reason things went wrong. She called herself his "life partner." In the same letter she described a company built by people who could not read the rules it was breaking.
On April 30, 2024, Zhao was sentenced to four months. He served at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California, and was released on September 27, 2024. He wrote most of a 364-page memoir in prison and self-published it in April 2026 as Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance. Forbes called it "a whitewashed account."
During those four months, the mother of his children helped run the company.
Do or Die, in Translation
The crisis came quickly through 2023.
On March 27, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance and Zhao in Chicago. Its complaint quoted Binance's money-laundering reporting officer: "we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes." On June 5, the SEC filed thirteen charges. About $790 million left the exchange in the days that followed. The Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus, Austria and Germany closed one after another. In July, senior executives resigned, and reports said up to a thousand jobs were cut, possibly three thousand by year's end. Binance.US lost its chief executive and a third of its staff. One of its earlier CEOs, Catherine Coley, had written in internal messages about $404 million moved from a Binance.US account to a company managed by Zhao, transfers she called "unexpected" and that "no one mentioned." She had left soon after.
During this period Binance did something it had avoided for six years. It put Yi He in front of Western journalists.
Bloomberg met her in May at the Address Fountain Views, a five-star hotel in downtown Dubai. Binance has no formal headquarters, but she and Zhao had built a base in Dubai. She made her case: "If they really took the time to understand our industry, they would find that if Binance is not compliant, almost no other global trading platform or offshore company is compliant." After the SEC filed, she wrote to the reporters on WhatsApp in a softer tone: "We respect the regulators' stance, whether they support or oppose the development of cryptocurrencies. I understand that the overall intent of regulation is to protect investors."
Fortune noted the "winsome photos of He at a plush Dubai hotel" and suggested it might be "part of a charm offensive." Possibly. If so, it was an odd one, because in the same interviews she explained why she had stayed out of view. Her English was limited, she said, and her conversations with Western journalists might strengthen the impression that Binance was a Chinese firm. In effect, the spokesperson was saying that she was the reason the company had avoided spokespeople.
The language issue was real and also useful. She began learning English in her mid-thirties. Her first full English-language interview, with City AM's crypto section, appeared on July 15, 2022, five years after she co-founded one of the largest financial platforms in the world. By 2025, Fortune reported, she could handle a long Zoom interview and turned to her translator only for Chinese idioms. In those years, a woman whose first jobs had been about talking had been mostly silent in the language of her regulators. Silence was a handicap. It was also protection. You cannot be quoted, misquoted or deposed in a language you do not use publicly.
In September 2023, Binance named a new chief marketing officer, Rachel Conlan, previously global head of brand and partnerships at OKX, the renamed OKCoin, where Yi He had started. On September 27, as The Wall Street Journal reported that Binance was "melting down," Yi He posted two screenshots of an internal letter on X with the comment "This is original." The letter was not a press release. It was addressed to her own staff.
— Yi He, internal letter to Binance staff, September 2023Every battle is a do-or-die situation, and the only thing that can defeat us is ourselves.
The letter said she had seen worse in 2019. It said it was "not the first time that I see the team hesitating between the feeling of invincibility and difficulty." The prescription was the one she had followed since the supermarket: "pay attention to user and market feedback, carefully evaluate valuable information, and continuously optimize and iterate products and operations." It mentioned regulators only to dismiss them as a factor. Act independently of them, she said. Compete on product and service.
On November 21, 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to register as a money transmitting business, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It agreed to pay $4.3 billion. Zhao pleaded guilty, paid a $50 million fine, and resigned. He kept his ownership. Richard Teng, previously Binance's global head of regional markets and before that a senior regulator at Singapore's central bank, became chief executive. He was a former regulator now running the company that regulators had pursued for years.
DL News noticed a gap in the settlement. Yi He's name did not appear in a resolution involving the Department of Justice, Treasury, the CFTC and others. When Binance disclosed its board in April 2024 under regulatory pressure, the list included Teng, three executives, and outside directors including a former Barbadian ambassador to the UAE. Her name was not on it either.
She held at least a tenth of the holding company, ran the venture arm and the listing team, and was absent from both the indictment and the board.
Two Chairs and an Old Number
Policy changed in Washington. Binance changed with it.
In March 2025, MGX, an investment fund backed by the Abu Dhabi government, put $2 billion into Binance, described as the largest single investment ever made in a crypto company. That same month, The Wall Street Journal reported talks between Binance and World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto venture. In August it reported that Binance was quietly administering a trading platform for that venture. Binance spent $800,000 on lobbying for clemency and other U.S. policy matters. A lobbyist named Ches McDowell met with Trump after an introduction from Donald Trump Jr. On October 23, 2025, Zhao was pardoned. "Deeply grateful," he wrote, with four praying-hands emoji. Eight days later on 60 Minutes, the president said: "I don't know who he is."
Six weeks after the pardon, Binance named Yi He co-chief executive alongside Teng. "She has been there from the start," Teng said on CNBC, "and she has been driving a lot of changes and driving the growth of Binance." Her statement praised their "complementary perspectives and shared vision." The structure was easy to read: a former regulator facing outward, the co-founder running the machine. Protos argued that the arrangement made Zhao's "non-executive" status "more blatant." Read more generously, it was the first time her title matched her power.
She described it in practical terms. "I don't really feel I have a big role," she told Moneycontrol in December 2025. "I believe something is an achievement already and the title, the money, everything else will follow. It's not about you have the title, and then you do something." She had already been stepping into departments that did not report to her. "When I see something should be improved, I directly change it." Two years earlier she had taken over human resources, which is not where empire-builders usually go. "When you are coming to be mature, you really should be putting more attention at the weaker parts," she said. "Maybe now we're a small garden today, but one day, I want that to be Amazon forest."
By August 2026, by one account, she oversaw HR, marketing, communications and customer support, more than 2,000 people and about a third of the workforce. In May 2026, Fortune ranked her 64th on its Most Powerful Women in Business list, the first crypto-native executive on it. Binance's press release had her speaking for its 310 million users, "including a son in Nairobi sending wages home to his mother, and a woman in a small Indian city opening her first account at fifty." The target, she said, was three billion. "In many ways, it still feels like day one."
Her public writing in these years mixed confession and manifesto. In an essay titled "Come! Let's Cultivate Together!" she said she had once refused to trade leveraged contracts because they "would magnify human weaknesses," and changed her mind only in the 2019 bear market, "when all cryptocurrencies plummeted and users were wailing." She described setting two contract teams against each other, then adding tests before users could trade and cooling-off periods for people who repeatedly went all in. She said she had once considered memecoins "a conspiracy disguised as a subculture," and ended with a line few chief executives would publish: "Opposing MEME, understanding MEME, and finally becoming MEME; the clown is myself." She wrote that compliance now received five times the resources of product. "We've paid a heavy price," she wrote, "so now we prioritize compliance."
The record after the plea complicates that claim, and the record is not hers to edit. In February 2026, The New York Times reported that Binance employees had found $1.7 billion in crypto sent to Iranian entities. Internal investigators who raised such transactions were fired or suspended. In March 2026, the Journal reported a Justice Department investigation into Iranian use of Binance to evade sanctions on groups including the Houthis. In May it reported flows to networks financing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continuing into that month. By mid-2026, Binance's bid for a European license under the new MiCA regime was reported headed for rejection, and the Journal later reported that Christine Lagarde had helped block it. In August, Reuters reported that Binance had handed Russian investigators the complete account history of a user who donated to the Ukrainian military: passport scans, KYC photographs, card payments, device fingerprints. The data was used to charge him with financing terrorism. Binance said it cooperates with lawful requests worldwide.
Users in Nairobi, users in Moscow, users in Tehran. A company that tries to serve everyone ends up serving everyone, including the people it should refuse and the governments that want someone handed over.
Then there is the call that was not hers.
On December 9, 2025, six days after she became co-CEO, her WeChat account began endorsing a memecoin called Mubarakah, a feminine form of Mubarak, the name of a memecoin associated with Zhao. Neither of them had endorsed it. According to one analyst, a hacker with a few thousand dollars had already bought a position while the token's market cap was under $2 million. Her account's apparent endorsement took it close to $5 million. The hacker sold near the top. Zhao apologized without naming the coin and blamed the platform: "Web 2 social media security is not that strong. Stay safu!" The slang means safe, the second character of the name she gave the company.
At 9:29 p.m. New York time she posted on X, in Chinese: "My WeChat was hacked." By then holders had lost 45 percent from the peak. In a follow-up she explained how it happened in two short clauses. WeChat, she wrote, "was abandoned long ago, and the phone number was seized for use. It cannot be recovered at present."
It was an old number from some earlier year, which she had stopped using and then forgotten, until someone else picked it up and used her voice to sell a free sample outside a market.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below come from a career that included both large achievement and serious wrongdoing. Some describe methods worth copying. Some describe methods that worked until they became liabilities. A few are cautionary. Each is grounded in the record above and stated as precisely as that record allows.
The principles
- 1.Recruit the talent before you need the company.
- 2.Name the fear your product must answer.
- 3.Put every hire on the support queue.
- 4.Hold the title lightly and the levers tightly.
- 5.Recognize when hesitation has a price.
- 6.Treat the bear market as the buying season.
- 7.Optimize instead of originate.
- 8.Let users overrule your convictions, then add guardrails.
- 9.Silence is a strategy that accrues interest.
- 10.Write the war letter yourself.
- 11.Go to the weak department.
- 12.Audit the past you abandoned.
Principle 1
Recruit the talent before you need the company
The most important hire of Yi He's career was not made at Binance. It was made at OKCoin in 2014, when she watched a programmer explain a hard subject simply and immediately brought him on as CTO. That job lasted less than a year. The relationship it created lasted more than a decade. When Zhao started Binance in 2017, his first call went to the person who had first recognized him, and the speed of their partnership on launch night depended on trust built three years earlier.
The lesson is about timing. Most founders recruit for a specific role at a company that already exists. She recruited a person, and the institution followed. The test she used was specific and worth copying: she was not looking for brilliance as such, but for brilliance that could be explained to a layperson. Someone who can translate is someone you can build a market around.
Tactic: Keep a short list of people whose work you would follow to any company, and invest in those relationships years before you have a venture to put them in.
Principle 2
Name the fear your product must answer
币安 means coin, safe. It was a positioning statement written for anxious retail depositors in a market where exchanges were regularly hacked and sometimes vanished. Its English counterpart came later in the SAFU fund, which turned the name into a balance-sheet line and was drawn on to cover users after the 7,000-bitcoin theft in May 2019. She did not name the company after what it did, which is trading. She named it after what its customers worried about.
This is the marketer's version of product strategy: find the objection that comes before purchase and put the answer in the brand. The record also shows the risk. A promise of safety can be audited by everyone, including prosecutors who later found weak money-laundering controls. A name like that has to be backed by the institution behind it.
Tactic: Before naming or positioning a product, write down the single fear that stops your customer from buying, and make sure both the brand and the balance sheet answer it.
Principle 3
Put every hire on the support queue
Requiring every new hire to spend weeks answering customer tickets did three things at once. It spread information: engineers learned where the product broke, and executives learned what users actually felt. It shaped culture: no one could treat the user as an abstraction after working the queue. It added capacity during periods of growth that would have overwhelmed any support team, such as 240,000 sign-ups in an hour.
She extended the idea outside the company with the unpaid Binance Angels and outside the hierarchy by personally answering complaints on Telegram, X and WeChat. One recovered $500 transfer became a story she still tells, and a story the CEO tells repeatedly does more to set culture than a policy memo.
Tactic: Make a stint in frontline support a mandatory part of onboarding for every role, including senior hires, and have leadership take a shift in public.
Y
Conventional Playbook vs. the Yi He Approach
How her operating choices departed from standard growth-stage practice.
| Conventional wisdom | Her approach | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Executives hold titles that match their scope. | Called herself "Chief Customer Service Officer" while running listings and venture. | Mixed |
| Support is a cost center staffed separately. | Every hire starts on the support queue. | Scaled |
| Pull back investment in downturns. | Invest "more aggressively" in bear markets. | Scaled |
| Be first to market. | "When you're first, following is the better strategy." | Durable |
| Reach users where regulators permit. | Pursued workarounds such as the reported Palau ID plan. | Risk |
| The founder is the public face. | Stayed largely silent in English for six years. | Mixed |
Principle 4
Hold the title lightly and the levers tightly
For years her formal title was chief marketing officer, a title she said she did not use. Her chosen title was customer service, a team she said she did not manage. Meanwhile she controlled the listing team Bloomberg called almost invisible, the venture arm managing $7.5 billion, and reportedly at least 10 percent of the holding company. When she became co-CEO she described the title as a formality: she had already been "directly" changing departments that did not report to her.
This principle is the most effective and the most ethically loaded of the twelve. A title that understates power lowers scrutiny, keeps you off board disclosures and out of settlements, and lets you work across the organization without turf fights. It also concentrates power where governance cannot reach it. Use the first half for effectiveness. Watch the second half.
Tactic: Measure your real authority by which decisions require your approval rather than by your title, and if the two diverge widely, ask whether your governance has kept up.
Principle 5
Recognize when hesitation has a price
The July 13 call was a lesson in pricing an option. Zhao framed the offer so that each hour of delay cost a share of the upside, and she accepted in the early morning, giving up a better salary and, by one account, initially working unpaid. She had made the same kind of choice before: leaving television while she was rising because she had concluded the medium was declining, and moving into Bitcoin in 2013 when most of her peers saw it as a fringe curiosity.
Her own explanation is straightforward: "My talent has always been trying to challenge myself." The more transferable skill is diagnostic. She could tell when waiting was free and when it was expensive. Most career mistakes come from treating a costly delay as if it were free.
Tactic: When you face a major decision, write down specifically what waiting a week would cost you, and if that number is large, decide now.
Principle 6
Treat the bear market as the buying season
She took over Binance Labs in August 2022, after Terra had collapsed and Celsius and Three Arrows Capital had gone bankrupt, and said it was "the best time for investing more aggressively." She told nervous limited partners "not to be nervous." She had already been through two bear markets: OKCoin's share gains came during one, and she said the 2019 downturn produced Binance's derivatives business.
The discipline matters as much as the boldness. She said Binance "can't buy something just for the sake of buying it," and wanted to filter out copycat projects that downturns eliminate anyway. Her stated preference was to focus on infrastructure and projects with real users, sustainable revenue, and a willingness to return value to token holders. The fund's Terra loss shows that bull-market discipline is harder.
Tactic: Build reserves and a screening framework during good markets so you can invest selectively and with conviction when competitors are forced to stop.
Principle 7
Optimize instead of originate
She is open about the fact that Binance invented little. "I wasn't the first to build an exchange, we weren't the first to develop contracts, we weren't the first to do C2C." She described her own strength as "optimizing and iterating existing things to their maximum potential," rather than going from zero to one, and compared it to sailing: "In a sailing race, if you're in the lead, you can easily follow the others."
This view is unpopular in an industry that celebrates originality. The record supports it. Her career consists of taking existing categories, such as Bitcoin exchanges, live-streaming, and venture funds, and running them better than the companies that started them. Her 2023 letter to staff made the same point: "continuously optimize and iterate products and operations."
Tactic: Pick a category where demand is already proven and compete on execution, service and speed of iteration instead of novelty.
Principle 8
Let users overrule your convictions, then add guardrails
She opposed leveraged contracts as amplifiers of "human weaknesses" until users suffering in 2019 changed her mind. She considered memecoins a conspiracy until she accepted, in her words, that "the clown is myself." Each time, user demand won, and each time she added a constraint: tests before trading derivatives, cooling-off periods for repeated all-in bets, and public warnings that she did not endorse memecoins.
This is a pattern, not a sign of indecisiveness. Moral conviction gives way to demand, and the conviction survives as a set of safety measures. Whether that is responsible adaptation or rationalized capitulation depends on whether the guardrails hold up. Leveraged products would later lead 1,700 UK investors to sue Binance for at least £150 million.
Tactic: When customer demand overrides a product principle you hold, put the principle into specific guardrails and track whether they actually reduce the harm you were worried about.
Principle 9
Silence is a strategy that accrues interest
For six years she kept a low profile in English. She explained it by her language skills and by concern that her presence would make Binance look Chinese. The silence worked: her name was absent from the $4.3 billion plea and the 2024 board list, and the attention went to Zhao. But silence does not remove scrutiny. It postpones it. When she finally gave interviews, it was during the company's worst crisis, and the first serious English-language portrait of her, the Journal's "Crypto Queen," was written by investigative reporters rather than by her.
She has since learned English, appeared on CNBC, and been ranked by Fortune. The lesson is not that she should have spoken earlier. It is that an unwritten public record is not empty. Others will eventually write it.
Tactic: If you choose to stay out of public view, keep a documented internal record of your decisions and reasoning, because someone will eventually ask for it.
Principle 10
Write the war letter yourself
In September 2023, while the press was predicting Binance's collapse, it was she who wrote to the staff, not the CEO. The letter acknowledged the danger ("every battle is a do-or-die situation"), referred to an earlier survival ("even more difficult situations in 2019"), named the internal risk ("the only thing that can defeat us is ourselves"), and gave a plan: better products, better service, ignore the noise. Then she posted it publicly with the comment "This is original."
The structure is worth copying even if the tone is not. A crisis letter that only reassures loses credibility the next time the news is bad. One that names the threat, recalls a past recovery and assigns specific work gives people something to do besides worry.
Tactic: In a crisis, write to your team directly: name the threat honestly, cite one past recovery, and give each person a concrete task for the next thirty days.
⏱
The Career in Sequence
Key moves in Yi He's career, from studio to co-CEO.
2006
Moves to Beijing for a counseling psychology program; later works at a clinic affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
2012
Begins hosting travel programs on Travel Satellite TV.
2014
Joins OKCoin as vice president in March; recruits Changpeng Zhao as CTO.
2015
Leaves OKCoin; joins Yixia Technology as VP in December.
2017
Accepts Zhao's offer on the night of July 13; formally joins Binance on August 8.
2022
First English-language interview in July; named head of Binance Labs in August.
2023
Speaks to Bloomberg in Dubai; internal "do-or-die" letter in September; Binance pleads guilty in November.
2024
Writes leniency letter as Zhao's "life partner"; he serves four months.
2025
Named co-CEO on December 3; WeChat account hijacked six days later.
2026
Ranked #64 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list.
Principle 11
Go to the weak department
Two years before becoming co-CEO, she took over human resources. It is not a prestigious post for a co-founder with a large stake and a venture portfolio. Her reasoning was about maturity: "When you are coming to be mature, you really should be putting more attention at the weaker parts." She wanted a system that would grow without her, "as a forest, they can grow their self."
Founders usually stay with the work that made them successful, which for her was marketing, growth and attention. Moving to the weakest function, whether HR or the compliance work she says now gets five times the product budget, means accepting that what built the company will not sustain it. It also reads as an admission that the company was built quickly without these systems.
Tactic: Once a year, find the function your company is weakest at and assign a senior leader to it, preferably someone who would not choose it.
Principle 12
Audit the past you abandoned
A week after she became co-CEO, someone hijacked her through a WeChat account tied to a phone number she had stopped using and had not secured. The hacker used her name to pump a memecoin. On a larger scale, the company carried legacy problems into its new phase: transaction flows linked to Iran, fired internal investigators, a European license reported headed for rejection. In each case, something left over from the growth era became the weak point.
This is the cautionary principle. Fast-growing organizations accumulate abandoned accounts, unenforced controls and forgotten workarounds. Those things persist and can be used by others. A phone number stopped working for her, then started working for someone else.
Tactic: Inventory every account, credential, entity and policy your organization has stopped actively using, and either secure it, enforce it, or shut it down.
!
Stated Commitments vs. Reported Record
Where Binance's post-2023 claims meet subsequent reporting.
| Stated commitment | Reported record | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance resources "over five times the size" of product. | NYT (Feb 2026): employees found $1.7B sent to Iranian entities; investigators fired or suspended. | Contested |
| "Zero tolerance" for illicit activity since 2023. | WSJ (May 2026): IRGC-linked flows continuing into that month. | Contested |
| Responsible global expansion. | MiCA licence bid reported headed for rejection, mid-2026. | Pending |
| Users "always at the center." | Full account data of a Ukraine donor handed to Russian investigators (Reuters, Aug 2026). | Contested |
| Protect users from loss. | SAFU fund covered users after the 2019 theft of 7,000 BTC. | Delivered |
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Yi He, to City AM, July 2022My talent has always been trying to challenge myself. I think a lot of people set limits for themselves so they just keep enjoying life and want to stay where they feel comfortable.
— Yi He, at Binance's fifth-anniversary event, as reported by DL NewsEveryone is a bit confused about who I am and what I do at Binance. I'm Binance's co-founder, but usually just call me chief of customer service, even though I don't really manage the customer service team.
— Yi He, to Moneycontrol, December 2025I believe something is an achievement already and the title, the money, everything else will follow. It's not about you have the title, and then you do something.
— Yi He, "Come! Let's Cultivate Together!"I once believed that adding leverage to contracts would magnify human weaknesses, and I vowed not to trade them.
— Yi He, "Come! Let's Cultivate Together!"Opposing MEME, understanding MEME, and finally becoming MEME; the clown is myself.
Maxims
- Hire the translator. Look for people who can explain difficult things simply, because they are the ones a market can form around.
- Brand the fear. Name your product after the worry that stops customers from buying, and then put real money behind that promise.
- Everyone works the queue. Make every hire, including senior ones, answer customers before they do anything else.
- Know what waiting costs. Some delays are free and some are very expensive, so work out which kind you face.
- Buy in the winter. Downturns clear out imitators, which makes them the best time to invest, provided you stay selective.
- Follow, then outrun. Being second in a proven category and executing better often beats being first.
- Turn convictions into guardrails. When users overrule your principles, keep those principles as specific limits on the product.
- Silence is not a record. If you do not write your own story, someone else eventually will.
- Go where it's weak. Assign senior attention to the function the company has neglected most.
- Old numbers still ring. Anything you abandoned but did not shut down can still be used, possibly by someone else in your name.
