Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is changing the head of its finance team. Kaiser Ng, its chief financial officer since January 2022, is leaving to start a venture of his own, and Justin Yek, most recently vice president of finance at payments company Airwallex, will take over the role. Co-CEO Yi He announced the change in a statement on Saturday, November 7, and said the handover had been planned for months.
“Kaiser Ng has decided to pursue a new venture after more than five years at Binance, with a transition plan implemented over the last six months,” Yi He said. “We wish him the best in his next chapter.”
A handover both men describe as long planned
Ng confirmed the move in his own posts on X and LinkedIn the next day. “After five years as CFO of Binance, I have decided to go build something of my own,” he wrote. “Moving from the CFO’s chair to the founder’s is a leap, and I take it with humility.” He said he had told Binance’s leadership about the decision months earlier, and he thanked founder Changpeng Zhao, Yi He and co-CEO Richard Teng, who replied that he had enjoyed working alongside Ng.
The new venture does not yet have a name. Ng said he wants to build projects that bring real world assets such as basketball and other sports properties, music, computer chips, robotics, gold and collectibles onto blockchains, a process known as tokenization. Zhao replied publicly that Ng had shared the plan months ago and that YZi Labs, the investment firm formerly known as Binance Labs, is “always keen to back ventures founded by current or former colleagues.”
“I am thrilled to step into the role of CFO at Binance,” Yek said in the statement. On LinkedIn, he added that Ng “leaves behind a world-class finance team” and thanked him for his support “throughout the transition over the past few months.”
Two careers that met at the top of crypto finance
Yek arrives from outside crypto. At Airwallex, a company that moves money across borders for businesses, he was vice president of finance. Before that he was an executive director at Morgan Stanley, where he led the bank’s Southeast Asia technology investment banking work, and he earlier worked at Citi, according to reports of his career history.
Ng came to Binance in January 2022 from rival exchange Kraken, where he had spent more than five years as finance chief. Earlier roles took him through mobile games company DeNA in Canada, payments processor TIO Networks and Canadian energy supplier BC Hydro. At Binance he ran finance through the most turbulent period in the company’s history, including the November 2023 settlement described below. “Finance is seldom the loudest function in a company, but it is where trust is earned,” he wrote in his farewell post.
Why the timing still draws questions
The announcement landed nine days after the largest theft in crypto history. On October 29, attackers took about $6.3 billion from Binance in an attack the FBI has attributed to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group. The timing invited obvious questions, and Binance’s answer is in its own statement: a transition plan running for six months started long before the attack, and the company has rejected any link between the two events. Industry outlet The Block noted what the announcement did not say. Binance has given no date for Ng’s last day or Yek’s first, and it has not described Ng’s next company beyond his own posts.
Yek takes over the finance function with two big jobs unfinished. Binance has pledged to fully cover the money stolen in October, and the company said in a November 3 update that about 98 percent of the affected token assets had already been replenished from its own funds. The exchange also still operates under the terms of its November 2023 guilty plea in the United States, a $4.3 billion settlement over anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures that forced Zhao to resign as CEO and put outside compliance monitors inside the company. Teng, a former regulator, became CEO under that deal, and Yi He joined him as co-CEO in December 2025. Keeping regulators and users convinced that Binance’s finances are sound is now Yek’s brief. Follow the story in our Technology coverage.