BNB Chain has appointed Thomas Chen as its first Chief Business Officer, a newly created seat on the leadership team. Chen's remit covers revenue strategy, institutional partnerships and long-term value accrual for the ecosystem, according to the network. He starts with the chain already sitting at more than $5.6 billion in total value locked on the real-world asset tokenisation side, second only to the largest network in that category.
A BitGo and Function résumé
Chen comes from Function, a Bitcoin yield protocol he ran as CEO, where he scaled the operation to $1.6 billion in TVL. Before that he was Managing Director and Global Head of Sales at BitGo. He grew assets under custody past $100 billion there and, per the announcement, helped set the company's course toward its IPO.
He has 15 years of career experience, more than seven of them building commercial teams across digital asset infrastructure. That covers institutions in both traditional finance and DeFi — a combination BNB Chain clearly wants pointed at its partnership pipeline.
What's actually in the remit
The job description is broad by design. Chen's portfolio spans institutional and capital markets, stablecoins and settlement, trading and liquidity, and ecosystem and distribution. On paper that is four separate business lines rolled into one office. His BitGo tenure maps to the custody and institutional-inflow side; Function maps to yield and protocol-level commercial work.
BNB Chain's pitch here isn't subtle. The network says it leads all chains with 15 million monthly active stablecoin addresses, and it points to stablecoins settling $7.2 trillion in February — the first month that figure topped the U.S. ACH network. If you're hiring a Chief Business Officer to chase revenue and institutional money, that's the slide you show.
The architecture argument
Underneath the commercial push sits a multi-chain stack: BNB Smart Chain, opBNB and BNB Greenfield. The network leans on high throughput, low transaction costs and full EVM compatibility as the technical reasons institutions should bother.
Worth noting that the RWA tokenisation number and the stablecoin address count are two different stories that happen to travel together. One is about assets being issued on-chain; the other is about dollar-denominated money moving across it. Chen's remit explicitly includes both.
Where the hire fits
Creating the CBO role is itself the signal — BNB Chain is formalising the commercial function rather than letting it sit inside product or marketing. The timing isn't random either. February's stablecoin settlement volume gave every large network a new argument for institutional business development, and BNB Chain is spending on it.
Chen's first measurable tests will be on the institutional partnerships and revenue side, where the network hasn't published targets. The stablecoin settlement and RWA TVL figures are the ones his team will now be judged against.
