Background & Biography
Yi He’s route into cryptocurrency began with experience in communication and consumer-facing businesses. In a 2023 public discussion, she described discovering Bitcoin in 2013 after working as a television presenter. Her subsequent professional record includes work at the digital-asset exchange OKCoin in 2014–2015 and a vice-presidential position at Yixia Technology, the mobile-video company behind services including Miaopai and Yizhibo. At Yixia, her responsibilities covered branding and marketing. These roles gave her experience with the practical challenge of attracting users to unfamiliar products and keeping their attention as those products evolved.
She co-founded Binance in 2017. In an interview with Authority Magazine, Yi described a career at the company that had involved marketing, customer service, mergers and acquisitions, and investments. She also described moving toward a coaching role as the organization grew. The account shows how broadly her responsibilities developed, while remaining her own description of that development. Her contribution is most clearly understood through these operating functions, rather than through an assumption that a founder personally designed every service associated with the company.
Binance appointed Yi head of Binance Labs in August 2022. The announcement assigned her responsibility for its global strategy and daily operations, with an emphasis on infrastructure, useful applications and support for founders. Axios independently reported the appointment at the time. That position placed her in a different relationship with the industry: alongside running parts of an exchange business, she was helping direct a venture and incubation operation that supported external teams.
Her current role changed again in December 2025, when Binance named her co-CEO alongside Richard Teng. The announcement linked her responsibilities to product development, community growth and the company’s strategic direction. Binance’s current leadership page also lists responsibilities across human resources, communications, customer support and products including Earn, Square and Academy. Its description of her venture-investment leadership is now historical. YZi Labs, the successor brand to Binance Labs, identifies Ella Zhang as its head, so Yi’s former Labs title should not be carried forward as a current appointment.
Notable Contributions
Yi’s public record places customer feedback near the centre of her approach to building products. In a June 2022 session for Binance Labs’ incubation program, she advised founders to identify their actual users and to learn directly from them. She described community participation as important to Binance’s early development and discussed the contribution of the Binance Angels program to community support. The practical emphasis was on a usable product, a clear understanding of demand and spending resources on problems customers actually experience.
That session is useful because it shows how she communicated operating lessons to entrepreneurs. Her advice covered both technical reliability and the commercial work around a product: team objectives, customer understanding and the relationship between marketing and useful service. It is evidence of a mentoring role and her stated priorities, rather than proof that every company in the incubation program adopted them. For an influence profile, the distinction keeps the focus on what she demonstrably contributed to the discussion.
The Binance Labs appointment formalized another part of that contribution. In its August 2022 announcement, Binance said Yi would focus on infrastructure and utility while supporting founders capable of building through difficult market conditions. Those were investment priorities set out at the time of her appointment. Historical portfolio sizes and performance figures from that announcement should remain attached to their original date and attributed to the firm. Individual investments also require their own evidence before being credited personally to Yi.
Education is a further strand of her public work. In October 2023, she supported the announcement of a Binance Academy and Blockchain Center program intended to extend blockchain teaching into universities internationally. The partners described a Kazakhstan pilot and a larger planned expansion, with Blockchain Center responsible for educational and training components. Yi’s statement emphasized the role of education in developing industry skills. The program’s targets were ambitions announced by the organizations, and should be evaluated against later delivery evidence rather than automatically treated as achieved outcomes.
Her management commentary adds a more organizational perspective. In a March 2023 Binance discussion featuring senior women executives, Yi emphasized clear communication, fairness, training and measurable work. She connected team development with a coaching approach and encouraged continued learning in a fast-changing sector. These statements help explain the leadership practices she publicly advocates. They also provide questions for future reporting about how a distributed company develops staff and makes responsibility clear as its products expand.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Yi He
Katharos.ai follows Yi because the operation of a cryptocurrency exchange involves more than matching orders. Customers encounter a company through its application, educational material, support channels, marketing and responses when something goes wrong. Her documented responsibilities span several of those points of contact. That makes her relevant to understanding how business priorities become the experience users actually receive, and how a platform’s public identity relates to its day-to-day operation.
Her position also connects two stages of company development: founding a business and sharing leadership of a much larger organization. The co-CEO arrangement makes the relationship between product ambition, executive accountability and institutional requirements particularly important. Binance’s move to an ADGM-regulated operating structure in January 2026 supplies part of that corporate context. It is a company-level development, and attributing the authorization or its implementation to Yi personally would require additional evidence. Katharos.ai’s attention stays on her documented responsibilities and the decisions that can be reliably connected to them.
Areas to Follow
- Product direction: changes to services within her stated remit, including how users learn about their features, limitations and risks. - Customer support and feedback: mechanisms for understanding complaints, communicating changes and turning recurring user problems into product improvements. - Shared executive leadership: the responsibilities of the co-CEOs, board oversight and accountability for major strategic decisions. - Founder support: verified mentoring, investment or incubation activity, with current organizations and decision-makers identified accurately. - Education and community: the delivery and quality of announced learning initiatives, alongside the relationship between educational content and commercial promotion.
Reporting Scope
Coverage centres on Yi’s public professional history, stated management approach and verifiable business responsibilities. It separates corporate achievements from personal contributions and historical positions from current appointments. Company-reported metrics and announced targets will be labelled accordingly, and promotion of a product will not be treated as evidence of suitability or safety. Private family matters and unsupported claims about internal power or ownership are outside this profile’s scope. Inclusion is an editorial assessment of influence, not a recommendation to invest or use a particular service.
Areas of Influence
Exchanges & Infrastructure is Yi’s primary category, reflecting her leadership of Binance and involvement in customer-facing operations. Investment & Founders captures her co-founder role, historical venture responsibilities and published work with startup teams. Community, Media & Education covers her professional communication background, community-building approach and participation in educational initiatives. Together, these areas describe influence exercised through organization, distribution and product decisions, with the strength of any particular claim depending on the evidence connecting her to it.
Katharos.ai publishes this profile for information, based on the sources listed. Inclusion is not an endorsement of the individual, their organizations, or any investment product.
Source notice: Information and images are attributed to the external sources listed. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subjects or claims described and does not independently certify the authenticity of every source statement or image.