From underdog to billionaire success: Meet the most powerful woman in crypto

Fortune

Binance's Yi He has been dubbed "The Most Powerful Woman in Crypto," and she recently spoke to Fortune's Jeff John Roberts about her journey to success.

Transcript

00:00And her response has been just to own it and say, yeah, I did come from a crappy background,

00:04but look where I got. Why don't you do the same? I recently spoke with Yi-Hee, who's been called

00:09the most powerful woman in crypto for a reason. She's the co-founder of Binance, world's biggest

00:13cryptocurrency exchange. And this is, I believe, only the second time she's done an English language

00:17interview. Binance came out of nowhere in 2017, within a year was the world's biggest exchange,

00:23and that's where it is right now, despite some massive legal troubles. I mean, that's maybe

00:27putting it too softly. CZ, the founder, had to go to jail for five months. They paid $4.3 billion,

00:33which is frankly a record fine for any company. What Binance was actually charged for was failure

00:39to put in proper money laundering controls. And yet somehow they're basically back where they were

00:44two years ago before those started. One reason that Yi-Hee is a very interesting figure is not just

00:48incredibly rich and very powerful through her job. She also has a rags to riches story. She grew up in

00:54a sort of poor rural village in Sichuan, province of China. She was the first to go to university.

01:00She'd never been into a library, so she stepped forth in the university. I've interviewed a lot

01:04of crypto executives, and Yi-Hee sort of stands out in that from her very humble beginnings.

01:10But also she's been, I think, genuine in how she's leveraged that with her customer base.

01:14Binance's early days were wild west and marked by fast innovation, fast customer growth. And that

01:20growth was driven in part by Yi-Hee's marketing savvy and her aggressive promotion and culture

01:26building at the company. Now we're going to a new era of sort of a more compliant regime.

01:31And the thing to watch is how Binance is able to navigate that and the role that people like

01:36Yi-Hee play in there and whether they can find a way to pursue their growth and their dominance,

01:41even within this more mature regulated structure.

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