Binance CFO Kaiser Ng steps down nine days after record hack

Binance has replaced its chief financial officer, Kaiser Ng, nine days after hackers drained more than $6 billion from the exchange. The company named Justin Yek, a finance executive from the payments firm Airwallex, as its new finance chief.

Co-CEO Yi He announced the move in a statement on Saturday, 7 November 2026. Yi He, a Binance co-founder, said Ng "has decided to pursue a new venture" after more than five years at the firm, and called the handover a transition that had been underway for about six months. Binance did not say when the exit takes effect or what Ng plans to do next.

Binance says the move was planned

Yi He made one point. The change, she said, began roughly six months ago, well before the October breach. Ng had been CFO since January 2022 and spent more than five years at the company. He arrived from Kraken, a rival exchange, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Look at the dates. That framing is hard to take at face value given the timing. A finance chief leaving nine days after the largest crypto theft on record does not read as routine, whatever the plan behind it. Binance produced no document showing the handover predated the hack. Two separate reports, from The Block and Investing.com, carried the same company statement and the same unanswered question.

Not everyone reads it the way Binance does. Several outlets framed Ng's departure as fallout from the breach, a reading the company rejects. Both things can look true at once. A plan can exist on paper and still be pulled forward by a crisis, and nothing in the public record settles which one happened here.

A new CFO walks into a drained treasury

Yek joins from Airwallex, where he was vice president of finance. He takes charge of a balance sheet under real strain. After the 29 October breach, Binance said it had replenished about 95 percent of the affected assets with its own money by 2 November, the day it finished a proof-of-reserves snapshot and started reopening withdrawals.

A proof-of-reserves snapshot is how Binance shows, on a set date, that it holds enough to cover what customers are owed. After a theft, that check carries extra weight. It is the thing a nervous user looks at before deciding whether to leave money on the platform. Ng oversaw that process on the way out. Yek will own the next one.

Money kept leaving even so. Customers pulled funds out once services came back online, a normal reflex after a shock this size. Yek inherits that outflow, the cost of covering user losses, and the slow job of proving the reserves are whole. None of it is cosmetic.

What Yek brings is payments experience. Airwallex moves money across borders for businesses, work that lives close to compliance, banking ties and reserves. That background fits a company trying to prove it can hold customer funds safely while regulators in several countries look on. Whether it is enough against a loss this size is another matter.

The hack behind the shake-up

The breach sits behind all of it. Attackers drained more than $6 billion across several blockchains on 29 October 2026, a sum Binance later put near $6.34 billion. The FBI blamed TraderTraitor, a group tied to North Korea, in an attribution issued on 31 October. Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, said the attackers had since swapped stolen tokens for about $124 million in bitcoin.

To put that in scale, the theft was larger than the roughly $4.3 billion Binance paid US authorities to settle criminal claims in 2023, and larger than any single crypto hack recorded before it. The $124 million traced so far is a sliver of what moved. Bitcoin traded near $75,800 at 20:10 UTC on 8 November 2026, according to CoinGecko, after a week of heavy ETF outflows.

Why the finance seat matters now

Binance is the biggest crypto exchange in the world by trading volume, so a change at the top of its finance team is not a small internal note. The CFO signs off on how reserves are reported and how the company answers regulators. Put a new person in that seat during a crisis, and every number they publish gets read twice.

This is not the first leadership change at Binance made under pressure. Changpeng Zhao, the founder, stepped down in November 2023 after pleading guilty in the United States, and the company paid about $4.3 billion to settle money-laundering and sanctions claims. Richard Teng took over as chief executive. Yi He, the other co-founder, became co-CEO in December 2025. Ng's exit is the newest move in that reshaped order.

Regulatory weight is part of the job now. Binance told users in four European Union states it would close their accounts by 31 December, part of a retreat as the bloc's MiCA rules take hold. A finance chief has to hold reserves, answer auditors and manage exits from whole markets at the same time. Yek takes that on with the hack still fresh.

What to watch

A few signals will show whether this is a clean handover or a forced one. Watch for an effective date for Ng's exit and any word on his next venture. Watch whether withdrawals settle or climb through November as Yek takes the chair. Watch whether Binance publishes a full, audited account of the loss rather than a self-reported 95 percent.

Yi He called this a planned step. The weeks ahead will test that in public, with a new finance chief, a drained treasury and regulators watching on two continents.