Binance CFO Kaiser Ng Steps Down Days After Record $6.3 Billion Hack
Binance's finance chief is leaving nine days after the largest crypto theft on record. The exchange says the handover was planned six months ago.
Kaiser Ng, the chief financial officer of Binance, is leaving the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The announcement came on Saturday, little more than a week after attackers stole about $6.3 billion in digital assets from the platform in what analysts describe as the biggest crypto theft ever recorded. Binance says the leadership change has nothing to do with the breach and was planned months ago.
What happened
Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and co-chief executive, announced the change in a statement on November 7. The statement said Ng “has decided to pursue a new venture” after more than five years at the company, according to TechCrunch, which cited a Bloomberg report. Justin Yek, most recently vice president of finance at Airwallex, a payments company founded in Australia, will replace him.
Yi He said a transition plan had been “implemented over the last half year,” TechCrunch reported. Crypto news site The Block, which also reported the six-month timeline, noted that the statement gave no effective date for Ng’s exit and did not describe his next venture.
Ng had been Binance’s CFO since January 2022, according to The Block. Before that, his LinkedIn profile shows he worked at Kraken, a rival US-based crypto exchange. Some older public directory listings describe his Binance role as senior vice president of finance, not CFO.
The hack behind the timing
The departure follows a breach that began late on Thursday, October 29. Attackers drained more than $6 billion from Binance wallets on several blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes, Reuters reported. The blockchain analytics firm Elliptic told Reuters the incident was “almost certainly the single-largest-known theft of any kind.”
Richard Teng, Binance’s other co-chief executive, called it a “complex attack” carried out by more than one person, Reuters reported. The exchange’s early findings pointed to a compromised laptop and malware meant to cover the intruders’ tracks. According to Reuters, the attackers manipulated the system that approves transactions, which let them move money out of an internet-connected “hot wallet” without the usual checks.
Accounts differ on who was behind it. TechCrunch and The Block reported that Binance and the FBI blamed TraderTraitor, a hacking group linked to North Korea. Reuters, reporting a few days earlier, said analysts suspected North Korea because the attack looked like past ones, including the 2025 theft from the Bybit exchange, but that the link was not yet confirmed. North Korea has denied involvement, and President Donald Trump said he did not know who was responsible but that his administration was investigating.
How Binance responded
Binance has said it will cover the losses with its own money rather than pass them on to customers. The main steps reported so far:
- The exchange set aside about $6.34 billion of company funds to cover the theft, Reuters reported. It also holds a separate $1 billion bitcoin reserve fund for security breaches.
- Stablecoin issuer Tether froze nearly $1.57 billion in assets linked to the attack, and Circle froze more than $800 million, according to Reuters.
- Binance had replaced about 95% of the affected assets by November 2, when it published a proof-of-reserves snapshot and began restoring withdrawals, The Block reported.
- After withdrawals reopened, users pulled a net $3.6 billion from the platform in the first few hours, TechCrunch reported.
The hack also hit the wider crypto market. Reuters reported that bitcoin fell to a six-week low of $76,368 and ether to a two-month low of $2,178 before both steadied. Binance’s own BNB token lost about 6.4% over 24 hours. Elliptic has since said the hackers swapped some stolen tokens for about $124 million in bitcoin, according to The Block.
What comes next
Binance has said the CFO change is an orderly handover, not a reaction to the breach. Even so, losing a finance chief during the costliest security failure in the industry’s history is likely to draw attention from users, regulators and business partners. Binance said in its 2025 annual report that it had about 335 million registered users and roughly $162.8 billion in assets under custody, according to Reuters.
Yek takes over the exchange’s finances as it works to absorb billions of dollars in losses and track down funds that have not yet been recovered. Reuters reported in early November that about $3 billion of the stolen assets had been located. Binance did not say what had happened to the rest. The exchange is working with the FBI and the US Secret Service on the investigation.
