Crypto Adoption Meets AI Security: A Discussion with Binance Chief Security Officer Jimmy Su

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From its early, rapid-growth stages, Binance has become the largest global player in the cryptocurrency brokerage space. That position has given Binance a clear, pro-crypto voice worldwide as countries look to regulate and adapt to the growth and implementation of cryptocurrency assets. At Consensus 2026 in Miami Beach, BeInCrypto met up with Jimmy Su, Chief Security Officer at Binance. We discussed the crypto market, Binance’s latest tools, and how it is adapting to institutionalization by traditional financial companies. The 30,000 Foot View In recent weeks, news broke that the US Senate would move on the Clarity Act. This legislation would create the regulatory rails to enable adoption by large financial institutions. That helped to push cryptocurrencies higher in May, although prices are still well off of last year’s peak. According to Su, even though crypto prices are trending higher over time, the real story is in increasing adoption itself: “I don’t pay too much attention to the day-to-day market movements, but I do see more adoption in crypto, more rural use of crypto, like RWA, tokenizing different rural assets. Those are all moving in the right direction. We have a five to ten year window and longer horizon within the assets, and I think it’s going well. We’re seeing a lot of the tradfi solution products and the crypto products moving into the same arena in the middle, where you are seeing crypto companies providing access to stock tokens, commodity tokens. And then you are seeing on the other side, tradfi providing more crypto services.” Crypto Meets Oil Binance has recently added significant new features to its platform. One of the more interesting features is the addition of contracts to trade oil prices. That’s a sign that crypto companies are moving towards the middle, with features that trend towards tradfi. More tradfi features are likely to be added to the platform in the months ahead. While that may mean less overall focus, it can also mean that cryptocurrency brokerages like Binance can grab a bigger market share: “We are expanding into areas where we are attracting new interest in trading. That moves us into a place where we’re moving from crypto, there are more tradfi trading products so our competitor pool is getting bigger.” Crypto Security In the Age of AI As the Chief Security Officer of Binance, Su has been at the forefront of protecting user data and developing new tools to guard against the ever-increasing sophistication of criminals seeking to gain access. Both the white hats and the black hats are increasingly turning to AI tools to identify threats – or create them. Looking at the attacker side of things, AI tools are speeding up the size and scale of attacks. Per Su: “Over the last six months, the adoption of AI has been expanding, not just in security, but all over our business. But especially in security, we see that it has both the advantages for the attacker and the defender. On the attacker point of view, using the AI tools, they’re able to scale much faster. What used to be needing a team of five or six red teamers to find vulnerability, now can be done with one person from my AI tool over a span of a weekend. So the time between the exploit and actually the coin attack is decreasing.” AI Can Be Used Defensively Too Typically, attackers in the security space can have a first-mover advantage. AI tools can speed that up. But defenders have access to similar tools as well. And the speed and sophistication of defensive AI tools can continue to thwart attacks. AI may even be able to identify attack vectors and plug holes before they’re exploited, or recognize the start of an attack well before a human can see the pattern at play. “On the defensive side, we see AI as a partner, as a SOC team member that we can partner with. It’s able to synthesize signals from different areas, different logs, email network on the endpoint device. So that helps us on the defensive side as well, so that we can look at the logs more broadly and more in depth and make it up just using our SOC team.” Security Threat #1: Check Your Links Regarding recent specific security threats, Su noted that malicious links in search engine results have soared, and the malware from those links could create a security breach: “Recently, we’ve seen a lot of distribution of AI tools. Many of the searches that you see on the search engine actually return ad results that has been poisoned. And sometimes when the user is not careful, they’re looking just in the top of the screen. The ads are not so obvious, and they might be installing a malicious AI tool. So that’s what we have caught in recent weeks. we have seen that users are actually installing AI tools that have malware in it, which would expose their credentials, including private keys, account credentials. So that’s a trend that we’ve seen.” Security Threat #2: Wrench Attacks Even if a crypto wallet is digitally secure, other threats exist. One is a so-called wrench attack, which involves physical violence to give up a digital wallet. While such an attack may not be completely avoidable, it can be possible to lock a wallet and ensure that even if some information is compromised, your crypto holdings aren’t: “We released a feature called Withdrawal Protection. This helps our users to have a control to specify the freeze for a certain amount of time in their withdrawal. This is at the moment, the crypto withdrawal is at the highest risk. Because many times when you withdraw crypto, it’s irreversible. Let’s say you were doing ACH on Jack and Young, that’s much more reversible. So we introduced this as a control, as a layer approach where the user gets to control when their withdrawal is frozen, so they get more time to recover in case they get into that potential.” From Security to a Streamlined User Experience AI tools can help balance security and protection with a seamless user experience. Binance’s growth and continued success has come from astutely managing this balance. Su sees ways to further streamline the experience with AI tools: “We are always looking for ways to balance the user experience with user protection. So sometimes the improvement you see is actually what you don’t see in the workflow. For example, we are adding more AI in terms of learning about the context of our users, so that when either they are logging in or doing withdrawal, if we know they are on a trusted device, and the behavior of the user matches what they had before, then we will introduce fewer challenges so that the experience is smoother. But the AI can also help us to spotlight users that have high-risk behavior, and that’s when we step up our challenges, such as using 2FA or biometrics or face recognition.” Looking Ahead Although Binance has added some significant features recently, there’s much more work that it can do. And they’re not resting on their laurels, instead looking for more ways to streamline the user experience, keep systems secure, and do so with fewer resources thanks to AI. One area with some improvement ahead? Faster and better coding thanks to AI tools: “We are using cloud code. So I think what we see is that from just being a tool to write code faster, test code faster, it seems to have a step up in this AI capability, where it’s able to synthesize the entire queue chain of an attack. So that’s very promising. Because that would mean that from discovering vulnerability to all the way deploying in the real world, AI can do that independently. So in that case, it’s not just a tool, but it’s a very capable Red Team member that we can have as a partner.”

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