Binance co-CEO Yi He announced on Nov. 7 that Chief Financial Officer Kaiser Ng is leaving the company to pursue a new venture after more than five years there, with a transition plan that had been in place for roughly the past half year.

Justin Yek, most recently vice-president of finance at payments firm Airwallex, takes over as CFO and says he looks forward to leading the finance department as Binance continues 'growing responsibly and fulfilling our mission globally.'

The handover announcement landed just over a week after the worst security event in the exchange's history, putting a new finance leader in the chair as the company works through the fallout.

The surprise is not that an executive at a company this size eventually moves on — it is that the exit was confirmed only days after hackers drained about $6.3 billion from the exchange in the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.

Binance says the CFO transition had been planned before the hack, but the optics of a leadership change immediately following a record breach will dominate the conversation among crypto watchers.

Ng's own pedigree underscores how senior the move is: his LinkedIn profile shows he has been Binance's CFO since January 2022, and before that he served about five years as finance chief at rival exchange Kraken, meaning the departing executive spent roughly a decade at the top of two major crypto firms.

Binance says the breach unfolded on Oct. 29 and began months earlier with malware hidden in software downloads and fake job recruitment efforts that targeted engineers, ultimately compromising several employees' computers.

According to NewsCord's aggregation of coverage, Binance explained that the attackers targeted digital assets valued at about $6.34 billion and that the exchange froze or intercepted roughly $2.85 billion in assets, restoring nearly 98% of the affected assets as of Oct. 31.

Binance also said it covered approximately 90% of the $6.3 billion taken. The FBI has blamed a North Korean hacking group for the attack, an allegation Pyongyang denies.

The company has committed to fully reimbursing affected customers rather than passing the losses on, a promise that makes the finance organization's leadership directly relevant: someone has to fund, account for, and report on a multi-billion-dollar hole. That is now Justin Yek's job from day one.

For Binance, the record heist and the CFO exit compound into a credibility test for the world's biggest crypto exchange, especially as it works through attribution of the theft.

The Straits Times notes the hack ranks as a record event of roughly US$6.3 billion, and Reuters-linked reporting frames the compensation commitment as central to the response.

Yi He wished Ng 'all the best in this new chapter,' but the identity of Ng's new venture was not disclosed in the pack reporting.

With the FBI's North Korea attribution standing and Pyongyang denying it, further disclosures about the attack's mechanics — and whether any additional assets are clawed back — could still move the story in either direction for the exchange's standing.