'Your assets are safe,' Singaporean Richard Teng, Binance co-CEO, assures users after historic $6.3 billion cyber hack

SINGAPORE: After hackers stole around US$6.3 billion (approximately S$8.05 billion) from the global cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance on Oct 29, its Singaporean co-CEO, Richard Teng, assured users on the platform that their assets were safe and that every loss would be covered with company money.

Mr Teng posted a video on his Instagram account (@tengrich) on Oct 31.

CNBC has called the incident the largest crypto theft on record, and Mr Teng said from the beginning that Binance would fully cooperate with authorities as investigations proceed.

Binance was founded in China in 2017, and its users are in the hundreds of millions today. In 2023, its founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in the United States to money laundering violations, but was pardoned by President Donald Trump last year.

Mr Teng took over after Mr Zhao stepped down, and in Dec 2025, Yi He was announced as the company’s co-CEO.

After the hack, which took place in just around 20 minutes, Mr Teng said that the incident may have stemmed from a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop.

"That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorised withdrawal transactions,” he said, explaining that it had been a complex process, and not merely “a simple 'one-click' action.”

Binance later said that it had discovered four additional points of breach.

The crypto research firm  TRM Labs was quoted in The New York Times as saying that “North Korea’s elite hacking unit” was responsible for the incident.

After the theft took place, withdrawals on Binance were suspended, and in his video, Mr Teng thanked the platform’s users for their patience.

He then went on to say: “I want to be clear. We are committed to covering all hack losses through our company funds. Your assets are safe.”

Mr Teng added that the recovery of stolen funds for users was underway, and that Binance has over US$6.34 billion in company funds to cover the stolen assets.

As further assurance, he also said that Binance never uses any of its customers’ funds, and so the funds that were affected had been from the company’s own hot wallet, which is a cryptocurrency wallet that stays constantly connected to the internet.

Who is Richard Teng?

According to a profile of the Binance co-CEO, Mr Teng’s reputation is for being “the grown-up in the room.” As a former regulator, he was brought on amid Binance’s troubles with the authorities to rebuild trust.

In Singapore, he worked for 13 years at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which functions as the city-state’s central bank, and served as its director of corporate finance. 

After that, his next role as as the chief regulatory officer of the Singapore Exchange.

From 2015 to 2021, he was the CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market, a stint which ended in August of that year when he became CEO of Binance Singapore. 

Mr Teng then went on to head the company’s regional markets for all its markets outside the United States. /TISG

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