How the Binance Yi, he became “the most powerful woman in the crypto”

The other co-founder of Binance, the flamboyant Changpeng Zhao, went to prison last year in the United States as a plea agreement of $ 4 billion. The situation has created a huge commercial challenge for Binance and for you, painful staff, because Zhao was not only the CEO of the company, but is the father of his young children.

Today, Binance seems to have resisted the test. Zhao has served his sentence, and Binance, despite the fact of the kind of blow that would have paralyzed most of the companies, is still in the lead as the greatest exchange of cryptocurrency in the world. Yi he helped get there, and after years of being able to go behind the scenes, assumes a more public binance.

In a rare interview, you said Fortune About her trip from the poor villager to the billionaire crypto, the tests she met during the year of binance crisis and her vision of an industry that quickly transforms global finance.

The common touch

During his life and his career, he overcome many obstacles – including the learning of English, which she only took four years ago in the middle of the thirties. During a long interview with zoom, he acquired well, withdrawing only on his translator when she has trouble explaining a Chinese idiom or proverb.

Communication power is something you know well. At Binance, she is renowned for her marketing and customer service skills, which helped jump to the largest exchange in the world in less than a year. To date, it is proud to listen to Binance customers on Telegram, X, WeChat and any other platform where they could be found, and insists that everyone does the same. She demanded that all those who come to work at Binance spend a few weeks on the front line of customer service.

Yi he describes a recent meeting with a university student who had sent $ 500 crypto to the wrong wallet, a common error and which generally means that the funds have disappeared. Yi, however, took the time to find and recover the poorly oriented funds, recalling how the student had said to him: “It is a little figure for you but everything for me.”

Yi he says that she can sympathize with such stories given her own experience by growing poor in the province of Sichuan, where she lost her father at the age of 9 and, at the age of 16, spent long hours working to promote soft drinks outside a supermarket. Although she finally went to university – he stops to recall the delights of being in a library for the first time – and a television host career, she says that her humble beginnings mean that she can always relate to many Binance customers of modest means.

Yi he is a tale of the echo of “Jenny from the block” by Jennifer Lopez, a song on a beautiful woman who keeps the common touch even after she is rich and famous – the kind of story of the Americans.

But that’s not like that he plays in China, explains Eowyn Chen, CEO of Crypto Firm Trust Wallet, who previously worked for Yi He in Binance. According to Chen, the Chinese are less inclined to tell the oppressed and are more likely to launch insults against those who have exceeded their station. Chen says that it is the regular target of articles and beards of social media that seek to demean and ridicule it, but that its answer is to transform negative rhetoric against those who lob.

“She said to people,” Of course, I came from a crap back and did I do well, so why don’t you do the same? ” “, Said Chen.

Yi He, which Bloomberg has nicknamed “The most powerful crypto woman”, climbed to the top of the blockchain world using this mixture of intelligence, agitation and base – the qualities she shares with her co -founder and her romantic partner.

Binance of construction

When Changpeng Zhao launched Binance in 2017, he had already built a disproportionate public figure as CZ, by which he is universally known today. Zhao built CZ mythology by taking excessive risks – like selling his Shanghai apartment in 2014 to buy more Bitcoin – and enthusiastically joining the community known under the name of Crypto Twitter.

Zhao asked Yi to join Binance in her early days but only after recruiting for the first time him Years earlier, when she persuaded her to join her as an Okcoin exchange chief (now OKX) in 2014. The pair shared an enthusiasm for the crypto but also other qualities. Zhao, like Yi He, spent his first years in an unheated rural school until his father immigrated to Canada where, in high school, Zhao occupies jobs at the minimum wage in Chevron and McDonald’s. Zhao is also inclined to applaud those who make fun of his history, even by retweeting memes of himself in a golden ornae uniform.

It was during their stay in Okcoin that the pair became a couple when they acquire an experience of the experience of a massive cryptography company. Today, the pair, which has never been married but remains romantically involved, works in close collaboration as parents and business partners. Yi he is co -owner with Zhao de Binance’s Venture Capital Arm that has become family, Yzi Labs, and holds at least 10% of the shares of the parent company, according to the Wall Street Journal.

On the nature of his relationship with Zhao, he asked not to be quoted on the file and rather provided a written declaration: “My personal life is independent of my professional life. My achievements and capacities as co-founder are often overlooked with my personal life in question, ”she wrote, while praising a Binance user base of 280 million customers.

Whatever the personal dimensions of the relationship, the professional side turned out to be very effective, with roughly the equivalent of the binance of Sheryl Sandberg, the executive who helped build Facebook in his early days while helping to found the CEO then indisputable, Mark Zuckerberg.

In practice, this indicated that Zhao occupied the role of the leader’s larger than life leader and the visionary of product, with Yi he moving massive growth through aggressive promotions, including car gifts. His approach has found the favor of the Chinese community abroad and also in China, where the crypto is technically prohibited but always extremely popular, in part because it is an easily transferable asset out of the reach of government capital controls.

An employee of Binance who asked not to be appointed to discuss the managers of the company described Yi He as a demanding boss, but who supports the employees and defends the people around him. By discussing Binance’s daily operations, he said that the basic principle of the company is “founding culture”, a sentence from the world of technology that describes companies that keep the initial motivation for their first days of start -up.

In the case of Binance, these beginnings were partly defined by the desire to play quickly and safe with the regulations and the hopard from one country to another in response to a meticulous examination. Although this strategy has helped fuel the incredible growth of Binance, it has sometimes been the greatest weakness of the company, the one that caused it to lose its most eminent founder.

Binance after Cz

At the beginning of 2023, the walls closed. After the collapse of the FTX exchange of Sam Bankman FTX the previous year, the Biden administration redoubled its efforts to bring the cryptographic sector to the heel – with a particular accent on the greatest player in the sector, Binance. The company’s lawyers were in discussion with the Ministry of Justice on various allegations for years, but ultimately the time had come to conclude an agreement.

In September 2023, the agency announced a radical regulation which would not only see Binance paying a fine of $ 4.3 billion – the largest of its kind in the history of the company, but also obliges Zhao to resign from CEO and to plead guilty of not having implemented adequate anti -lavage measures. Both Wall Street Journal And Reuters, meanwhile, cited several anonymous sources to say that the agency sought to force the business as well. (“Binance’s advocacy agreements with American regulators are a subject of public file,” said a company spokesperson.)

Despite this massive blow both to his treasure and his leadership, Binance two years later remains the greatest exchange of Crypto from afar under the successor of Zhao, Richard Teng. Former high-level regulator of Singapore, Teng helped the company to implement a series of compliance measures and to project a new image which suggests that it has evolved beyond the rapid tactics and loties of its beginnings. In January, Binance also made a major step – for the first time, introducing an official structure of the board of directors, with seven members, including Teng and three independent administrators.

Despite all this, a former employee of the company said Fortune That the power of Binance resides a lot where he still has – with Zhao, Yi He, and two other executives from Binance Early Binance, Lilai “Roger” Wang and Wei “Sonny” Zhou. The person, who asked not to be identified in order to speak frankly, added that he has a last word in all staff problems and exercises the greatest authority with regard to customer experience decisions. The spokesperson for Binance, on the other hand, said that the complaint was not exact and that the culture of the company encourages employees to exercise a high degree of autonomy.

The founder of a venture capital company, on the other hand, described Binance as a company managed with an “iron fist” which, despite the new legal constraints and the challenge of managing a sprawling global operation, is not in danger of losing its place as a market leader. This evaluation seems to be supported by recent data, provided by Coingecko, which show that the Binance retains the share of the lion of commercial activity – 39% of the volume on centralized exchanges in June – despite the emergence of new competitors:

Co Ringecko

For Yi He, the continuous domination of Binance is a validation of its customer -oriented strategy, and the personal devotion of the founder of the company to the crypto – a technology which it considers to be transformative, to the same degree as the arrival of the Internet has changed traditional media and television.

Yi he predicts that the crypto will accelerate its thrust into the conventional financial system through stablescoins and other blockchain technologies and that, in five to 10 years, the two kingdoms will be fully integrated into each other.

On a personal level, he says that the mass adoption of the crypto looks like another massive technological change that it has known since the time of her daughter not so long ago, when her house had no electricity or running water.

As for the tests she has experienced along the way, she quotes a Mongolian proverb: “Since you have talked well, do not talk about pain. If you talk about good, do not mention the pain.”