Lisandra Dra

1. From the margins to the spotlight—when I first learned that I had been selected (by Fortune) for the “Most Influential Women in Business” list, my first reaction was: by what grace? My second reaction was: the responsibility is heavy. This recognition bears my name, but it belongs to the Binance team, to Binance users, and more than that to Satoshi Nakamoto—to every community member who turns this industry from an idea into a global wave. A few years ago, if a native entrepreneur from the crypto industry appeared on such a list, it would have seemed unusual; today, it feels more like our industry has been walking step by step from the fringes of finance and technology into the spotlight. This isn’t “my achievement.” I’m only seeing the wave rolling in, brave enough to stand on the surfboard, clumsily learning how to catch each wave. But this recognition also marks another step in the long journey of how the blockchain industry has moved from niche geek players into everyday mainstream life. The road is still long. It asks us to keep making steady progress—day by day, step by step—to build, to refine, and that is exactly what we do every day. I often call myself the “Chief Customer Service Officer,” and I really like that title. At Binance, every colleague who enters management spends their first month doing frontline customer service, and every quarter they rotate back—so do I. The logic is simple, even a bit clumsy: things you can’t see from inside an office are seen by users every day on your behalf.

Last year in Dubai, a young Kenyan man stopped me when the crowd was dispersing. Every month he sends his paycheck home to his mother through Binance. He didn’t ask about blockchain architecture or tokenomics. He only wanted me to know how much faster his mother gets paid now, and how much less money disappears along the way. He doesn’t need to be “educated” about what crypto is. What he needs is a product that works. He isn’t an exception. In the past five years, more than 34 million people have completed remittances through Binance Pay, with a cumulative volume of over $87 billion. Based on the World Bank’s global average remittance fee rate of 6.36%, we helped users save more than $5 billion—money that didn’t vanish into intermediaries, but returned to the family dinner table, to children’s tuition, and to seed funding for small businesses.

2. They should decide for themselves what kind of person to become, and what kind of life to live. I was born in a small village in Sichuan—a place so hard to find on a map. When I was little, power outages sometimes happened, and I had to do my homework by kerosene lamps. Girls in the village, under the age of 16, would take other people’s ID cards and go to factories. When I was 9, my father passed away. My uncle told my mother, “Since a girl has so much schooling, it’s better to save the money for marrying off your son.” But my mother was extraordinarily坚毅—she taught as a substitute teacher and farmed at the same time. She raised everyone in the household on her own and sent me to normal university.

Over the years, I’ve often been asked: since you’re financially free already, why are you still working so hard? To be honest, not everyone has the opportunity to change the world. But I am creating history—since I’m already here, why not give it a try? The ancients said: “When poor, focus on benefiting yourself alone; when successful, extend your help to the world.” In India’s second- and third-tier cities, there are groups of women aged 36 to 50. Their mothers never had their own bank accounts—some of them even a year ago didn’t. Over the past year, they’ve become one of our fastest-growing user groups. Those who nobody listens to are quietly reclaiming their right to know and decide—bringing back their own judgment, their own money, and the future of their own families—from old systems, into a faster, more efficient, and lower-cost financial world. They are like me 12 years ago, when I first began to think: what is money? This question matters more than any grand narrative. Over these years, Binance has done tens of thousands of small things in rural areas of South Africa, Brazil, and India: scholarships, training, and the most basic financial literacy classes. They may not be big individually, but one by one they are happening.

I don’t like the phrase “empowering women.” It sounds like someone is holding a key and deciding whether to open the door for you. What I’d rather do is take down that door, so more people can walk in. They should decide for themselves what kind of person to become, and what kind of life to live.

3. From 300 million to 3 billion. Back then, when we said Binance would serve 1 billion users, outsiders thought we were being wildly optimistic. Today, we have more than 300 million users—1 billion is no longer a distant dream. So this year, we’ve changed the target to 3 billion.

Honestly, before I said that line out loud, I also wondered: Is this number right? Do we deserve it? But there’s one thing I’m certain about: if we don’t set the goal here, nobody will set it for these 3 billion people. 3 billion is roughly the number of adults worldwide who have not yet entered the formal financial system. This means what we need to build is no longer just a crypto exchange, but a suite of financial infrastructure that can support the daily lives of 3 billion people.

AI is reshaping productivity. But if productivity only belongs to a few companies, that isn’t a revolution—it’s a new monopoly. Over the past year, we’ve been gradually handing ordinary users tools that used to be affordable only for professional institutions: so that someone who doesn’t know how to code can still have AI help them optimize decisions; so that someone encountering crypto for the first time can use natural language to ask the questions they want to ask. Finance shouldn’t be only a language for a few.

What blockchain needs to solve is something else: to make sure that every person using AI can share in the portion of value created by AI. Only by combining these two things can we truly pave the path from 300 million to 3 billion.

Someone once said something very simple: if you don’t like the world, then go change it. From that 30-year-old small village in Sichuan—step by step, to the county town, to the provincial capital, and then to the world—I understand better than anyone that the world you want is like Rome: it won’t be built in a day. So we’ll keep going back to work. Day by day, inch by inch, effort won’t be in vain.

He Yi, Binance Chief Customer Service Officer

May 27, 2026