PANews Editor's Note: At the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival held on April 20th, Du Yu, head of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, and He Yi, co-CEO of Binance, engaged in a fascinating in-depth dialogue on the theme "From Leap to Reconstruction: The Future of Finance is Being 'Reprogrammed'". The full text of the dialogue is below:

Du Yu: Hello everyone! I'm Du Yu from Wanxiang Blockchain Labs. I've felt everyone's enthusiasm today, so I won't go into too much detail. Please say hello to everyone first.

He Yi: First of all, thank you all so much for coming to Hong Kong to see me. Actually, I'm here to see you all too. It's a great pleasure to see you all here. Hello everyone! I'm He Yi, Binance's "Chief Customer Service Representative." Thank you!

Du Yu : It's an honor to have you here today. We also spoke on this stage last year, online, and it's a great privilege to have you here in person. A year has passed, and many interesting things have happened in the industry, especially the impact and opportunities brought by AI. I think we are at a pivotal moment of diverse convergence, and it's particularly interesting to have this conversation with you. In this complex cycle, I saw many people ask you specific questions at yesterday's AMA, and today I'd like to talk more about your macro perspective on the industry. There are people from various fields here, from traditional finance to startups, and I heard that many students have flown in specifically to hear your sharing. In the market environment of the past six months, what are your personal interests? What new changes are on your schedule, or that you think about a lot, that excite you or even make you feel a sense of urgency?

He Yi: Regarding AI, my current life and time allocation, particularly my work, can be roughly divided into three modules:

First, the approaching singularity of AI is indeed a moment that no one can ignore; it truly is a major turning point in human history . Therefore, I spend a lot of time thinking about the potential changes that the combination of AI and blockchain, and AI and finance, might bring to the world, and what the future of finance will look like. This means I need to think about what Binance's products and services will likely look like ten years from now.
Secondly, I spend a lot of time thinking about organization and talent . We often say that a company's early growth may be driven by the strengths of the founder, co-founder, or individuals. However, when a company reaches a certain size, what matters is organizational effectiveness—how to enable the organization to be self-driven and self-growing. This is something I have been constantly thinking about and working on.
Third, it's often said that cryptocurrencies and traditional finance are further merging . At this crucial moment, we're seeing both the US and Hong Kong governments showing significant support and encouragement for the blockchain industry. Therefore, I believe the entire industry will undergo a revolutionary transformation. Often, we are unaware of the singularity when it arrives. It might happen on a typical day when we're eating, drinking, and sleeping, but its impact on our lives could mean that all global foreign exchange will occur on the blockchain, no longer relying on the old SWIFT system; it could mean that all asset transactions will no longer be limited by a few hours, but will operate 24/7 globally, like the cryptocurrency market.

Therefore, we see that the whole world is entering a state of "pushing forward" at a very high speed.

Du Yu: You just described a very exciting future. In the past, discussions about the future always seemed to be about three, five, or ten years from now, but this year feels different. I think an exponential inflection point is right there, possibly happening today or tomorrow. I think many of you here probably share this sense of urgency. Following on what you just mentioned about the evolution from AI to the future of finance, let's delve deeper into some interesting topics.

Let's start with AI. AI is crucial in changing organizational structures, especially for a company like Binance that's almost ten years old. You may have seen many tech companies laying off employees recently, but their stock prices haven't dropped afterward, not because of poor performance, but because of improved organizational efficiency. Even the recently popular "one-person company" concept, while I personally think it's a bit exaggerated or we haven't reached that point yet, is undeniable. Companies with three to five people, or even less than ten, can now do what companies with dozens or hundreds of people used to do—this is already happening.

AI is rewriting everything. How has AI changed your personal thinking and decision-making, as well as large platforms like Binance, and even multinational organizations? I think Binance faces more challenges than many other large companies because you are a very global company; there aren't many companies more global and distributed than you. What opportunities and challenges has AI brought you?

He Yi: First of all, Binance does not plan to lay off employees or reduce costs and increase efficiency on a large scale like most technology companies .

For us, AI is actually about making strong people even stronger . For example, in the past, a programmer might have innovative, structured thinking, but their coding skills might be limited. But today, writing code with AI is very smooth and mature; it can actually improve efficiency by 10 times . I've discovered something quite interesting.

We once had an employee who was caught working multiple jobs because his efficiency improved significantly from using AI to write code. He felt his work was much easier, so he took on another job, and of course, he was eventually fired.

The overall thinking is that we want to further enhance the organization's productivity and innovation capabilities, rather than simply pursuing cost reduction and efficiency improvement at the current scale . This year, I proposed an idea that might sound a bit crazy to others: we used to say we aimed for 1 billion users, but this year I told everyone that we should aim for 3 billion users . Because we already have 300 million users, what does it mean to become a company with 3 billion users? It means that Binance is not just an exchange, but a global financial infrastructure; it means that our services must be geared towards ordinary people, towards the masses, towards everyone. The services we provide might be their daily payments, their daily financial management, permeating every detail of their daily lives. This will push me to encourage employees to do more innovation and experimentation. As our business continues to expand its boundaries, our infrastructure must be sufficiently stable. I've also received a lot of feedback from friends saying that our product could be made smoother, so I've spent a lot of time optimizing the product this year. Give me a few more months, and I will further improve it.

Secondly, regarding the impact of AI on us. In the past, when we understood AI, we thought of it as a highly intelligent child. However, if you've ever raised a young child, you'll know that children sometimes talk nonsense. I don't know if you've seen the film "Little Red Flowers" by director Zhang Yuan, but the kindergarten children in it think their teacher is a monster. You'll find that AI has many similarities to highly intelligent young children; it may lack structured logic, and its memories may be discontinuous. But in this logic, we've discovered that AI is undergoing a huge leap: in the previous cycle (2025), AI was essentially a highly intelligent brain, but today, in just a few months, I feel that AI has already grown its own "hands."

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