Binance’s Yi He: “My talent has always been trying to challenge myself”
Crypto AM meets Binance co-founder Yi He…
Details about the world’s largest crypto exchange have long been shrouded in mystery.
Until recently, Binance, which processes as much as $76bn of transactions per day, operated without disclosing the location of its headquarters and without securing permissions from local financial regulators.
As the firm has opened its business activities up to scrutiny, it has also shed fresh light on how it was founded.
Accounts of Binance’s origins tend to focus on the exchange’s enigmatic founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao – a former McDonald’s burger flipper and technology whizz from China who has become one of the world’s richest people in a matter of years.
However, CZ built the exchange in partnership with a co-founder, Yi He – a woman who still leads the company as its chief marketing officer.
One of Yi’s earliest contributions was creating the Chinese name for Binance, where ‘币’ means crypto and ‘安’ means safety.
“No one can be successful on their own,” Yi He told Crypto AM, in her first ever English language interview.
“I believed CZ was the best partner for me because of our culture, his background and his skills. I knew we had an opportunity to build a globally famous, top-level company.”
Yi He, a former TV anchor, was an early entrant into the crypto space.
In 2014, just five years after the launch of Bitcoin, the world’s first crypto currency, she co-founded the crypto exchange OkCoin.
Yi He was friends with some of the crypto industry’s earliest investors who encouraged her to use her media skills to promote the new technology. After doing her own research she became convinced that blockchain and cryptocurrencies could transform the existing financial system.
“I felt it really had the potential to help people globally,” she says. “I came to the decision to join very fast. I believed it would be the future.”
Yi recalls that leaving the security of her role in media to enter the uncertain world of digital assets felt like an easy decision for her to make.
“My talent has always been trying to challenge myself,” she said. “I think a lot of people set limits for themselves so they just keep enjoying life and want to stay where they feel comfortable.”
She first met CZ at a conference soon after beginning to work with OkCoin and remembers watching him give a presentation on blockchain technology.
“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 quickly brought CZ onboard at OkCoin where she led the branding division. However, after a few months of working there together both had left the start-up.
“I don’t want to talk too much about OkCoin,” she says.
“Sometimes at the beginning the industry is really small so you don’t have too much choice.”
It wasn’t long before CZ returned the favour, inviting Yi He to embark on building Binance in mid 2017. She agreed to offer her services for free.
The rise of Binance has been meteoric. In five short years the firm has ballooned into a global behemoth with 5,000 employees and 90m users. Yi He has taken newfound success in her stride.
“I don’t really feel shocked,” she said. “When I joined Binance I knew that this was our target.”
Yi He’s role has grown to cover customer service, marketing and PR as well as plotting the company’s lifecycle. Despite her expertise in branding and media, however, she has stayed out of the media spotlight and rarely comments on her role at Binance in public.
“I lack the language skills,” she explained. “CZ is definitely a better candidate to be the public face of the company. He’s like the captain, or the driver and if the company has too many public figureheads that would make people confused.
Yi He has actively encouraged CZ to do interviews with media outlets and represent the brand globally. “He’s learning faster than me. You can see on social media like Twitter that now he is very active.”
While Yi He has often shunned the limelight, CZ now ranks among the most prominent figures in the crypto space. However, she insists that neither herself nor CZ, who is worth an estimated $16.4bn, likes to show off their wealth.
“We’re not really buying luxuries like houses or cars,” said Yi He. “I think just this year, CZ went to Dubai and bought an apartment, but it isn’t filled with very luxurious stuff.”
A reticence to show off wealth shared by the founders of Binance may have something to do with a desire to avoid scrutiny where possible. Over the past eighteen months, Binance has been attracting the attention of financial regulators for all the wrong reasons.
In June 2021, the UK’s financial watchdog, the financial conduct authority (FCA) issued a sharp toothed warning about Binance on its website, which revealed the exchange was operating without proper permissions. Banks including Barclays, Santander and HSBC blocked UK card holders from buying crypto using the exchange.
In January this year, Binance entered into an agreement with Equonex and gained partial ownership of Digivault, a firm regulated by the FCA. A further warning was issued by the City regulator, stating that Binance continues to offer products which “pose a significant risk to consumers”.
Yi He said the relationship between Binance and regulators is ‘improving’. The exchange recently announced plans to set up a regional European headquarters in Paris where it has attained approval from a European regulator for the first time.
Dubai has also been tapped as a prime location for a regional headquarters.
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She said: “We have talked with the FCA many times. We have also spoken to very high-level government figures. I think we are on the right path now.
“A lot of people think that getting regulatory attention is not a good thing for Binance. I believe it is definitely a good thing. Because if this industry was really small and people didn’t care about it, it would mean the industry had no future.”
Having worked hard to ingratiate Binance with regulators Yi He said the exchange could even push ahead with a public listing in future.
“A lot of investors are really interested in being a shareholder and investor,” she added.
“For now, we have not made the decision. It depends on where we want to go.”
Looking ahead, however, Yi He is not fretting too much about the possibility of a regulatory clampdown. Instead, she said Binance’s most pressing issue was finding the right staff.
“The biggest challenge that we face is making sure we hire the best people in the world. That’s our major challenge,” she said.
“In this industry everything moves very fast, and changes very fast. So, this means you have to hire a lot more people and they may work for you for just a few months because they can very easily find a new job.”
The crypto space also remains heavily dominated by male investors, chief executives and developers which can limit the talent pool available to employers. Yi He thinks that women are often discouraged from joining the tech sector during their education and as a result of gendered societal expectations.
“When some women hear about technology they feel like that’s not their talent and take a step back. We can give ourselves a limit,” explained Yi He.
“I think that’s because of an education and cultural problem. When we are young our teachers and families tell us men are better at strategy or logic and girls are more interested in art or social matters. I don’t believe that.”