Yi He helped turn Binance from a new crypto exchange into the largest digital-asset platform by trading volume, then stayed at its centre through the company’s most difficult transition. As co-founder and Co-CEO, she brings a distinctly commercial perspective to crypto — marketing, customer behaviour, product adoption and the business of making financial technology usable at enormous scale.
Her influence was largely exercised behind the scenes while Changpeng Zhao became the public face of Binance. That changed in December 2025, when Yi He stepped into the co-CEO role alongside Richard Teng. By 2026, Binance had more than 300 million users and was targeting one billion.
Before Binance, Yi He worked in television before entering crypto at OKCoin, where she recruited Zhao to join the business. They went on to co-found Binance in 2017. While Zhao became its public face, Yi He helped build the commercial engine around the technology, with responsibility spanning marketing, customer experience, business strategy and growth.
Her management philosophy is unusually close to the customer. In Binance’s early years, she and Zhao personally handled customer enquiries. She later pushed managers across the company to spend time on the frontline. Her view was simple: executives see dashboards, while customers experience the product.
That principle has shaped how she thinks about crypto more broadly. Yi He has spoken about meeting a Kenyan worker in Dubai who used Binance to send his salary to his mother. His concern was not blockchain. He wanted his mother to receive more money, faster. For Yi He, that is the real test of financial technology: whether it solves a problem people actually have.
She has also acknowledged where Binance has fallen short. In 2025, she said the company’s wallet product lagged competitors and linked its more cautious approach to lessons from earlier compliance failures. Her focus has increasingly shifted towards making crypto simpler and more useful, rather than asking consumers to understand the technology itself.
In 2026, Fortune named Yi He among its Most Powerful Women in Business. Her elevation reflects a wider change in her role. After years as Binance’s influential operator behind the scenes, she is now helping determine what comes next for one of crypto’s most consequential companies.
