Binance co-founder Yi He said that now as co-CEO of the exchange, she will be the face of the exchange’s community and culture alongside Richard Teng, who has a more focused role on regulation and compliance.
“I, as co-CEO, will be able to continue Binance’s culture, and at the same time, we have a CEO with regulatory experience, so we will form a bridge. We can translate the language of our technology into the language of the regulator,” says the CEO.
Yi He was announced as co-CEO alongside Teng on Wednesday (3) during the Binance Blockchain Week event in Dubai. Teng has held this position since 2023, when he took office after the exchange’s founder and fellow Yi He, Changpeng Zhao, was forced to relinquish leadership of the company under an agreement signed with the US Department of Justice.
According to Yi He, the idea is that the two can support each other especially when making difficult decisions. The businesswoman believes that the future of the brokerage is to become a kind of Google for crypto assets, going beyond the services of buying and selling cryptocurrencies.
“People can learn at Binance Academy or Binance Square and also use it for payments. People can use it for different things, but many will continue to know it only as an exchange. It’s like Google, which has long ceased to be just a search tool.”
Another point the company is focusing on is developing artificial intelligence technologies. Yee says she is very involved in this market because technology has become part of people’s daily lives.
“We have been pushing our employees hard to learn how to use AI,” he said. “AI now is a lot like learning how to use the Internet in its early stages.”
Yi He also commented on what it means to be a woman at the head of a large technology company, noting that there is no chivalry in the corporate world. “When we open the door, people will say the woman goes first. But if this is a competition, no one will say the woman goes first. No one will give you clients. That never happens.”
For executives, the world is changing rapidly and women can achieve a lot if they invest in increasing their professional skills and maintain an open mindset to try what seems unprecedented and impossible.
She also noted that Bitcoin’s (BTC) four-year growth cycle with corrections as large as 70% could be broken by a greater penetration of institutional capital into the cryptocurrency world. “My opinion is that the four-year cycle will probably start to change, because the players have changed,” he said.
According to her, it would have been unthinkable 12 years ago that a traditional institutional player like BlackRock would join this sector. The manager currently owns the largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the world.
*The reporter traveled to Dubai at the invitation of Binance.