Impeccable timing. Binance announced on Saturday November 7 the departure of its financial director Kaiser Ng, nine days after the costliest hack in the history of cryptocurrencies. The platform had only just reopened its withdrawals and saw billions of dollars slip away in twenty-four hours. Co-CEO Yi He assures that the succession has been preparing for six months and the calendar is no less talked about.
Kaiser Ng leaves Binance, Justin Yek inherits the accounts
The announcement is contained in a few lines transmitted to Bloomberg and taken up by The Block. Kaiser Ng âdecided to embark on a new projectâ after more than five years at Binance, according to Yi He. His replacement is Justin Yek, until now vice-president of finance at payment fintech Airwallex. Binance does not specify the effective date of departure, nor the nature of this new project.
Kaiser Ng had served as Binance's CFO since January 2022, after a stint at Kraken. He therefore held the cash register during the most turbulent years of the exchange: the fine of 4.3 billion dollars negotiated with the American justice system in November 2023 and the forced departure of Changpeng Zhao. Then October 29 arrived.
Coincidence of the calendar? Yi He wanted to cut it short. According to her, the transition plan âhas been implemented over the last six monthsâ. Well before the piracy. You can take her word for it. But no public document supports this schedule, and an unlisted company has no obligation to produce one. Yi He herself has only shared the co-CEO chair with Richard Teng since December 2025.
Binance hack: $6.3 billion stolen and methodical laundering
Return to the invoice. On October 29, TraderTraitor dumped Binance wallets on several blockchains. The FBI attributes the attack to this North Korean group. Elliptic estimates the loot at $6.43 billion, including $1.48 billion in bitcoin. Binance speaks of 6.3 billion and has promised not to pass anything on to its customers. Its November 3 incident report describes a months-long operation, with a booby-trapped development tool, a fake job interview, and compromised internal AI tools that opened access to the wallets' signing infrastructure.
Withdrawals reopened on November 1 for bitcoin, then for around fifteen networks. Not all. Friday, November 6, Binance still indicated on X to aim for the end of the following week for HYPE, INJ, APT, NEAR or LTC. The exchange had reconstituted around 95% of the affected assets as of November 2 by dipping into its treasury and its SAFU emergency fund.
Meanwhile, the pirates are working. According to the latest report from Elliptic, hackers have already converted approximately $124 million worth of altcoins into bitcoin. To do this, they used more than 20,000 wallets spread across 16 blockchains. The stolen XRP passes through the THORChain exchange protocol. As for SOL, it has almost entirely switched to bitcoin. However, the laundering of stolen funds remains far from over. The sector, however, froze nearly $2.85 billion. Around 3.11 billion are still sleeping on identified addresses (especially in ether and bitcoin) and 470 million are missing. Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, expects to see the remaining ether converted in small batches and then sold through over-the-counter brokers and Chinese laundering networks.
Singapore tackles Binance and deems crypto trading unsuitable for the general public
The Singaporean regulator did not wait for the departure of the CFO to drive the point home. On November 5, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) responded to the daily Lianhe Zaobao. She recalled that Binance does not have the right to provide regulated financial services in the city-state. The exchange has also been on its investor alert list since September 2021. âTrading crypto-assets is not suitable for the general public,â said a MAS spokesperson. The regulator urges consumers not to deal with unregulated entities. He adds that a licensed actor does not protect anyone from the risks specific to cryptos.
Binance, however, claims nearly 300 million users and around $171 billion in assets. The platform withdrew its license application in Singapore in 2021 and closed Binance.sg the following year. The city-state therefore re-releases the file five years later, at a time when the exchange is trying to convince its customers that the fund is full and that its new guardian was chosen without haste.
