The Crypto Queen Pulling the Strings at Binance
U.S. authorities toppled the king of crypto. But the queen is still standing.
Changpeng Zhao’s time atop Binance was cut short after he pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws. The government’s case showed that the world’s biggest crypto exchange was a den of international money transfers for terrorists, drug dealers and sanctions violators. Untouched in the upheaval was Yi He, who co-founded Binance with Zhao and has been his chief lieutenant in running the exchange.
She is also Zhao’s romantic partner and the mother of three of his children. Since Zhao resigned last month, Yi He, 37 years old, has assumed Zhao’s mantle as Binance defender-in-chief, calling critics “mediocre and hopeless" on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. In a sign of her stature, she recently led a public chat with the platform’s Chinese-speaking users side-by-side with the company’s new chief executive, Richard Teng, a former regulator.
To several former Binance executives, she represents the regulation-phobic strategy that resulted in the company’s guilty plea and $4.3 billion in fines, the largest ever by a crypto company. Binance is also fighting a separate lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Zhao’s absence, Yi He is the largest shareholder sitting inside the company, with sweeping control over its marketing and investment divisions.
She and Zhao live in Abu Dhabi, although he is in Seattle awaiting sentencing. Though chastened by the Justice Department’s case, Binance remains the most powerful platform in crypto, processing billions of dollars of trades a day. Yi He has wielded her influence over the selection of Binance’s new majority-independent board mandated by U.S.
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