Binance CFO Kaiser Ng left the platform following last week’s spectacular $6.3 billion heist, which third-party security firm TRM Labs and the FBI have both blamed most likely on a North Korean state-linked group called TraderTraitor.
A statement from Binance co-CEO Yi He, obtained by Bloomberg, appears to attempt to lay out a timetable for Ng’s departure that is unrelated to the infamous attack.
“Kaiser Ng has decided to embark on a new venture after over five years at Binance, with a transition plan implemented over the past six months,” he wrote. “We wish him the best in his next chapter.”
According to Bloomberg, he also named Justin Yek as the company’s new CFO.
In an incident report released earlier this month, Binance said it, not users, will bear the financial brunt of the attack. He also said other companies managed to freeze or intercept about $2.85 billion in stolen assets. (It can be extremely difficult to recover frozen cryptocurrency, and Binance is reportedly working with the FBI on this.)
It’s unclear what will happen to the remaining assets that escaped Binance’s grasp, which Bloomberg’s Matt Levine estimates could be worth $3.3 billion. The attackers decided to quickly launder the stolen tokens and many of them are likely unrecoverable; However, Binance indicated that it was easily able to cover the entire $6.3 billion shortfall with its own funds.
Heads often roll after such major corporate mistakes, even though there are no reports that the outgoing CFO had anything to do with the incident. Additionally, people in the crypto world often act…differently from their peers in traditional institutions. As Levine wrote, at least one company admitted to reporters that it had profited handsomely from hackers’ willingness to pay above-market rates to launder stolen assets into tokens that cannot be frozen or recovered: “It’s very funny and very crypto of these guys to say ‘oh yeah, we made a killing helping North Korea launder their stolen money.’ I have the impression that in traditional finance, we don’t brag about it to journalists.
Binance did not respond to a request for comment on this story, but we will update if we receive a response.
Gn bussni
