Crypto
Binance names new CFO nine days after $6.3 billion hack
The exchange says the handover was planned months ago, while it reports about 98% of the stolen assets replaced and roughly $3 billion frozen.
HedgeWeekly News Desk ·
Binance has appointed Justin Yek as chief financial officer, replacing Kaiser Ng, who held the post from January 2022. Yek joins from payments firm Airwallex, where he was vice president of finance, and earlier worked at Morgan Stanley and Citi, Fox Business reported on Sunday.
The change comes nine days after a cyberattack on October 29 in which hackers took about $6.3 billion of crypto, reportedly the largest digital-asset theft on record. The FBI has attributed the attack to North Korea's TraderTraitor group, which it also linked to last year's $1.5 billion Bybit hack. Binance says the CFO transition was planned more than six months ago and has nothing to do with the incident.
On recovery, Binance said in a November 4 update that it had replenished about 98% of the affected assets, up from 95% on November 1, using its own resources. The remaining tokens are less liquid and will take longer. About $3 billion of stolen assets have been frozen with law enforcement, token issuers and blockchain-analytics firms, the exchange said. Customers withdrew a net $4.72 billion after withdrawals reopened, about 3% of platform assets and mostly in the Tether stablecoin, while Binance reported $2.7 billion of inflows over the same period.
For funds and allocators with exchange exposure, the open questions are verification and counterparty risk. Co-CEO Richard Teng has promised a detailed incident report, and Binance is widening its proof-of-reserves snapshot to 44 tokens from 10, with the full zero-knowledge proof still to be generated. Watch whether outflows stay near 3% and whether the report confirms how the attackers got in. The figures on replenishment and frozen assets come from Binance itself and have not been independently verified.