In April 2024,Zhao Changpeng entered a federal prison in the United States.
At that moment, a Wall Street Journal reporter asked a key question: Who is in charge of Binance now?
The answer is He Yi.
For those four months, she was Binance's largest actual controller, overseeing the marketing and investment departments, helping to select independent compliance inspectors for three to five years in Binance, and during the company's most perilous times, she led the team to grow the user base from 130 million to 200 million.
Some say that U.S. authorities toppled the king of cryptocurrency, but the queen remains unshaken.
This statement is the best key to understanding He Yi as a person.
She knew early on what she wanted
In 1986, He Yi was born in a rural area of Sichuan, with both parents being teachers.
She started primary school at five years old, with classmates two to three years older than her. She didn't find it difficult; she found it boring—none of her peers could relate to her. This childhood loneliness made her form a habit: reading, reading a lot, reading all the books she could find on her parents’ bookshelf.
She later studied at Renmin University of China, and her first job after graduation was as an assistant counselor at the Psychological Counseling Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After a short while, she resigned. Her reasoning was simple:
“To excel is to become an expert in the field, and that is not the future I want.”
This judgement is the underlying logic behind all her choices in life—she would never stay in a place where she couldn’t see the future, even if that place offered stable income and a decent title.
Then she participated in a selection for a host at tourism television, not expecting much, yet she smoothly made it to the position. Hosting travel shows, filming on location, climbing mountains, wading through waters, and catching crocodiles, she appeared glamorous on camera, but she herself said that job was nothing but “eating, drinking, playing, and having fun, with no value”; she wanted to do something that could change the world.
However, during those years as a host, she did an unremarkable but critical thing—she didn't socialize with people in the entertainment industry; she socialized with entrepreneurs, listening to them talk about investments, projects, and entrepreneurship every day.
Your interests and hobbies determine what kind of people you meet.
This line is said by her and is also how she lived her life.
Something she didn't even understand led her to see the direction
At the end of 2013, the price of Bitcoin had just crossed $1,100,OKCoin had just opened, preparing to launch a Chinese New Year Bitcoin red envelope activity. Through friends, they found He Yi and asked her to help promote it in her social circle.
At that time, He Yi had no idea what Bitcoin was.
She searched for it online.
After searching, her judgment was: This thing definitely has a future.
She helped spread the red envelopes. Then, through that event, she met OKCoin's founderXu Mingxing, and they talked for a long time at a dinner, where Xu invited her to come see the company.
In early 2014, she joined OKCoin, securing the title of Vice President, responsible for marketing.
In an industry filled with tech geeks, financial speculators, and blockchain enthusiasts, the arrival of a travel show host was striking. She used this visibility to accomplish what OKCoin needed most—transforming the company from a small platform known only in geek circles to a brand that the public could recognize.
She appeared on the job-hunting reality show “You’re Hired”, bringing OKCoin into the public view of ordinary people who knew nothing about cryptocurrency.
She brought interviews with “Marie Claire”, “Bazaar”, and “Caijing” to turn a tech company into a publicly talked-about brand.
In 2015, she led the advertising campaign for OKCoin on the big screen in Times Square, marking the first time a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange appeared in the world's most expensive advertising space.
In just two years, OKCoin's user base grew from a few thousand to over one million, capturing 60% of the market share.
But more importantly, there was another thing.
She dug up Zhao Changpeng, then was dug up by Zhao Changpeng
In 2014, it was He Yi who brought Zhao Changpeng into OKCoin. She valued his technical background and understanding of the industry, bringing him into this circle.
Later, a well-known dispute occurred between Zhao Changpeng and Xu Mingxing, where both left OKCoin. He Yi also left during the same period, “This experience helped us develop a tacit understanding and laid the foundation for creating Binance.”
She went on to briefly work with YXTechnology—the parent company of Miaopai, Xiaokaxiu, and Yizhibo. There, she spearheaded the rise of Miaopai, achieving a user penetration rate of 61.7%, with 70 million daily active users and a peak daily view count exceeding 2.5 billion views. This was during the intense competition in the short video battlefield, before ByteDance dominated the market, and during that period, she was one of the key figures shaping the landscape of China’s short video industry.
On June 18, 2017, Zhao Changpeng invited her to dinner and presented Binance's whitepaper.
She glanced at the whitepaper and then laughed—not because the whitepaper was good, but because the project’s Chinese name sounded terrible, “like the name of a supermarket.”
She asked, why isn't the exchange called Binance?
This was something she said before officially joining. She hadn’t even decided to join yet and had already named the company.
In August 2017, she released an open letter announcing her departure from YXTechnology to join Binance as a co-founder.
She had once brought Zhao Changpeng into OKCoin, and three years later, Zhao Changpeng brought her into Binance.
She remarked: At the beginning, I dug him up; now he dug me up, so we are even.
She saw the half of Zhao Changpeng that he couldn’t see
Zhao Changpeng is a man of technology and speed. He has very high standards for products, efficiency, and system architecture, but he knows he has a shortcoming—brand appeal and community engagement.
He Yi filled that gap.
She established Binance's earliest community operation system, creating a network of offline meetups in major cities across China, which was pioneering at the time in the entire cryptocurrency industry.
She transformed cryptocurrency from something only tech enthusiasts could understand into a movement that ordinary people were willing to participate in.
She understood something that Zhao Changpeng was less adept at grasping—people believe in something not just because it works well, but because they feel it belongs to them, and that there’s a group of people like them involved. A sense of community, in the cryptocurrency space, is more difficult to replicate than technology itself.
She also demonstrated another crucial capability—crisis management. On Binance's first day online, BNB’s price dropped from $1 to $0.5. Zhao Changpeng lost ten pounds over three weeks due to immense pressure. She stabilized the entire team and maintained external communications, preventing the incident from escalating into a trust crisis.
This ability to maintain stability during tumultuous times was something she had practiced and perfected at OKCoin.
Her name did not appear in the plea agreement
In November 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Zhao Changpeng and Binance, disclosing numerous details of compliance issues at Binance, including He Yi’s involvement. Reports indicate that the Department of Justice wanted He Yi to resign but ultimately did not hold her accountable. Her name did not appear in the plea agreement.
The reason is unclear.
These four words are the most profound in this matter.
There are several possible interpretations:
One is that her level of legal involvement was indeed lower than Zhao Changpeng’s since she was mainly responsible for marketing and users, rather than compliance and anti-money laundering.
Another interpretation is that she or her legal team found a clear boundary in that storm and maintained that line.
Regardless of the reason, the outcome is the same: Zhao Changpeng pleads guilty, resigns, and goes to prison, while He Yi walks away unscathed, and during the four months that Zhao Changpeng was away, she became the true helmsman of Binance.
In an organization, true power often does not reside in the most visible position, but in the indispensable yet not easily targeted position. He Yi plays this role at Binance—she is the face of the brand, the core of the community, the driving force behind user growth, but she is not the one signing regulatory documents or making compliance decisions.
This positioning, whether by coincidence or deliberate design, is difficult for outsiders to judge. But the result is, when the storm arrives, that position is safe.
She has always been doing the same thing
Looking at He Yi's trajectory over the past twenty years reveals a very clear pattern—
Every leap she made was before others fully realized the value of something.
In 2013, Bitcoin was still a toy for geeks, with most people unaware of what it was. She glanced at the search results, judged it had a future, and jumped in.
In 2015, the wave of short videos and live streaming was still brewing, with ByteDance yet to dominate the market; she joined YXTechnology and participated in that wave early on.
In 2017, the globalization of the cryptocurrency industry had not truly happened yet, and most exchanges were still focused on the Chinese market. What she and Zhao Changpeng did was to target global users from the start, building communities in English and turning global users into Binance's first batch of seeds.
Her method of identifying opportunities does not rely on complex analytical frameworks but rather on an intuitive perception of trends coupled with the courage to jump in before others act.
This bears some similarity to Meituan's Cai Wensheng, who can sense where the wave is before most others. But He Yi has something extra—she not only identifies the wave but also understands how to find the position most suitable for herself within that wave, and then maintains that position.
The success of women does not come from men, but also from the ability to "strategize"
In completing this series, many individuals come to mind, from Guo Jia to Jia Xu, from Lu Su to Sima Yi, from Fan Li to Zhang Liang, from Huang Zheng to Zhao Changpeng; each strategist has their own unique background.
He Yi is the first truly analytical female strategist in this series.
Her strategy is not like Guo Jia's precise deduction, not like Jia Xu's patient self-preservation, nor like Lu Su's macro strategic framework. Her strategy is a unique combination of capabilities—perception of trends, leveraging resources, and maintaining position.
Perception of trends: Her ability to leap half a step ahead of others. She saw Bitcoin, short videos, and the globalization of cryptocurrencies before most people did.
Leveraging resources: She always finds the most worthwhile person or platform to leverage, then connects her abilities to achieve a multiplier effect. OKCoin was her first leveraging platform; Zhao Changpeng is currently her greatest leverage.
Maintaining position: Her most difficult-to-replicate ability. She knows which positions in an organization are core but not the most visible, then places herself in that position, takes root, and holds on. When the storm arrives, that position is the safest, and she happens to be there.
There is a piece of wisdom in Chinese culture—“soft on the outside, firm on the inside.” On the surface, one appears soft, flexible, and cooperative, while internally there is a clear judgment and strong sense of direction, not easily swayed by others’ logic. He Yi is such a person.
From a rural child in Sichuan to the co-founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, she has navigated through distinct battlefields of hosting, OKCoin, YXTechnology, and Binance, never allowing any of those fields to define her. Each time, she extracted what she needed from those environments and continued forward.
This method of progression is not luck; it is a form of clear-sighted life strategy.
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