While founder Changpeng Zhao has long been the face of Binance, another figure—Yi He—wields immense power at the company and is little known, at least in Western media. But in a revealing new Bloomberg profile, He comes forward and explains how she shaped Binance.
The tale is a spicy one as the relationship between Zhao and He is, well, complicated. The pair were once romantically involved and have children together—raising inevitable comparisons to another crypto power couple: disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, his sometimes girlfriend and CEO of the hedge fund that was the vehicle for stealing billions of dollars of customer money. But He rejects drawing any parallel between her and Ellison, who is lying low in New York and cooperating with authorities in what is likely a bid to stay out of prison.
