Binance’s chief financial officer Kaiser Ng has left the platform after last week’s spectacular $6.3 billion heist, which third-party security firm TRM Labs and the FBI have both put the most likely blame on a North Korean state-linked group called TraderTraitor.
A statement from Binance co-CEO Yi He, as obtained by Bloomberg, seemed to go to pains to lay out a timeline for Ng’s departure that isn’t tied to the infamous attack.
“Kaiser Ng has decided to pursue a new venture after more than five years at Binance, with a transition plan implemented over the last six months,” He wrote. “We wish him the best in his next chapter.”
According to Bloomberg, He also named Justin Yek as the firm’s new CFO.
In an incident report released earlier this month, Binance said that it, not users, will bear the financial brunt of the attack. It also stated other firms had 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 it.)
It’s not clear what will happen to the remaining assets that evaded Binance’s grasp, which Bloomberg’s Matt Levine separately reported could be worth $3.3 billion. The attackers moved to quickly launder the stolen tokens and many of them are likely irrecoverable; however, Binance reported it was easily able to cover the entire $6.3 billion hole with its own funds.
Heads often roll after corporate blunders this big, though there’s been no reporting indicating that the departing CFO had anything to do with this incident. Plus, people in the crypto world often act… differently than their peers at traditional institutions. As Levine wrote, at least one firm admitted to reporters it profited handsomely off the hackers’ willingness to pay above-market rates to launder the stolen assets into tokens that can’t be frozen or recovered: “It is very funny and very crypto for those guys to be like ‘oh yeah we made a killing helping North Korea launder its stolen money.’ I feel like in traditional finance you don’t brag about that to reporters.”
Binance didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story, but we’ll update if we hear back.
