While founder Changpeng Zhao has long been the face of Binance, another figure—Yi He—wields immense power at the company and is little known, at least in Western media. But in a revealing new Bloomberg profile, He comes forward and explains how she shaped Binance.
The tale is a spicy one as the relationship between Zhao and He is, well, complicated. The pair were once romantically involved and have children together—raising inevitable comparisons to another crypto power couple: disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, his sometimes girlfriend and CEO of the hedge fund that was the vehicle for stealing billions of dollars of customer money. But He rejects drawing any parallel between her and Ellison, who is lying low in New York and cooperating with authorities in what is likely a bid to stay out of prison.
“There is a significant distinction here: Caroline was an employee, whereas I am a partner,” He told Bloomberg. “The relationship between cofounders requires much more than what a dating relationship does. A cofounder relationship is about comradeship, a dating relationship is about chemistry. The former is based on shared beliefs and goes beyond gender, the latter is based on physical attraction and selfish desires.”
The psychology of corporate romances is beyond my pay grade, but I totally accept that He is no Caroline Ellison. The latter was a smart but self-absorbed dilettante who wandered indirectly into FTX's web of lies, while He, a former TV host in China, was a power player in crypto before she even met Zhao. In fact, she once hired the future Binance founder to be CTO when she worked at the OKCoin exchange. So her role at Binance is certainly that of a trusted advisor and behind-the-scenes boss, not as a courtesan hanger-on.
A more interesting element of the Bloomberg story is the decision to have He step into the media limelight in the first place. As the article notes, Binance is facing an existential moment as the U.S. government cracks down on the company with the full force of its financial and law enforcement might. One reason for this is dodgy dealings at Binance.US that involved inflating trading volumes with secret accounts—something that He appears to have been involved in—and the company's attempts to bamboozle regulators. So the new profile, which includes winsome photos of He at a plush Dubai hotel, may be part of a charm offensive by Binance as it fights to survive the regulatory onslaught.
The most intriguing aspect of He, though, is her role running "both the Binance arm that invests in crypto projects and the one that decides what gets listed. Binance’s token listing team, supervised by her, is so secretive that few insiders even know its members." This is an aspect of Binance's business the company never talks about, and that likely creates enormous revenue in the form of projects paying for exposure. Alas, the Bloomberg profile doesn't explore the topic further. That's too bad as He's dealings in that secretive business unit are far more significant than her thoughts on Caroline Ellison.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
