Binance CFO steps down days after $6.3B hack, Justin Yek in

Binance is swapping out its money chief days after the biggest theft in crypto history. Kaiser Ng is leaving the chief financial officer job after more than five years at the exchange, co-CEO Yi He said in a statement reported by Bloomberg News on Saturday. Justin Yek, a veteran of Citi, Morgan Stanley and payments platform Airwallex, takes over. Yi He said a transition plan has been in the works for six months.

The timing is hard to ignore: hackers lifted $6.3 billion from Binance just days ago, an attack the FBI has pinned on North Korea. It now stands as the largest heist the industry has ever seen. Binance says it has already covered roughly 90% of the stolen sum as it works to make users whole. Yek said he is thrilled to take the role and looks forward to scaling the finance organization responsibly.

Ng is no crypto newcomer. His LinkedIn shows he landed at Binance in 2022 after a five-year run at rival exchange Kraken. Yek arrives from Airwallex, where he was vice president of finance. Binance has not linked the departure to the breach, framing it as a planned handoff.

Binance is not alone in getting hit. ByBit lost $1.5 billion to hackers last year, a reminder that exchange security keeps failing at scale. PYMNTS noted that while Binance customers are shielded from immediate losses, the stolen assets themselves and the infrastructure moving them remain largely untouched, and recovery is far from certain.

The bigger question is who steps in when things go wrong. Crypto rails are inching closer to traditional finance, and Kraken now holds a limited purpose account with access to the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Small exchanges cannot necessarily match Binance's financial response, PYMNTS reported, and reimbursements do little about stolen funds flowing downstream. The hard part is enforcement: who bears the losses, and what actually stops the money from moving.