Binance Replaces Its CFO Nine Days After Its Record Theft

Binance said on Saturday that Kaiser Ng is leaving as chief financial officer and that Justin Yek will take the job. Co-chief executive Yi He gave the reason as a new venture, and said a transition plan had been running for half a year. The announcement landed nine days after the 29 October breach of the exchange, the largest crypto theft on record. Neither the statement nor the reporting around it links the two events. The company did not say when the change takes effect.

What the statement actually says

"Kaiser Ng has decided to pursue a new venture after more than five years at Binance, with a transition plan implemented over the last half year," Yi He said in a statement.

That sentence is the whole of the company's explanation. Reuters carried it on Saturday afternoon under a Carlos Méndez reporting line, and The Block published the same wording that evening, crediting Bloomberg and Reuters. Yi He does not mention the hack. The six-month timeline is the load-bearing claim here, because it would put the decision well before October, and no supporting document has been published by either outlet. It rests on the statement alone.

Who takes the seat

Ng has been Binance's CFO since January 2022 and worked at the rival exchange Kraken before that, according to The Block's reading of his LinkedIn profile. Reuters gives his tenure as more than five years at the company, which is the longer figure because it covers his time there before the finance job. Yek was most recently vice president of finance at the payments firm Airwallex. Neither account read here reports what Ng's new venture is, or who else was considered.

The theft figure still moves

The number behind the timing has never settled. The Block's Saturday piece says attackers drained more than $6 billion across several blockchains. Reuters calls it a record $6.3 billion. A CoinDesk headline dated 30 October puts the sum Binance arranged to cover its losses at $6.34 billion, which measures the response and not the theft. Binance's own early count was $6.3 billion against Chainalysis at $5.9 billion. Those figures do not reconcile, and no outlet read here explains the spread. The FBI has attributed the attack to a group it calls TraderTraitor.

How much has been made good

The restitution counts disagree too. The Block reported that Binance had replenished about 95 per cent of affected assets as of 2 November, when it completed a zero-knowledge proof-of-reserves snapshot, a cryptographic check that a custodian holds what it claims without revealing the accounts. A summary published on Saturday citing CoinDesk puts replenishment nearer 98 per cent and says about $2.85 billion has been frozen. Neither figure confirms the other, and the two were measured days apart. Elliptic said on Friday that the attackers had swapped stolen tokens for $124 million in bitcoin, and withdrawals have been reopening in phases since the start of the month.

What is missing is a date. Binance has not said when Ng stops signing and Yek starts, and a finance chief changing hands in the middle of a restitution programme is a matter of weeks, not quarters. The statement is silent on whether Ng keeps any role through the handover. That is the part Saturday's announcement left open.