TikTok CEO set for grilling in House hearing. But U.S. lawmakers also face questions
Shou Zi Chew, chief executive officer of TikTok Inc., speaks during the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022.
Bryan van der Beek | Bloomberg | Getty Images
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will face a tough crowd on Thursday when he testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee while his company is on the brink of a potential ban in the U.S.
Although TikTok is the one in the hot seat on Thursday, the hearing will also raise existential questions for the U.S. government regarding how it regulates technology. Lawmakers recognize that the concerns over broad data collection and the ability to influence what information consumers see extend far beyond TikTok alone. U.S. tech platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, Twitter and Snap’s Snapchat have raised similar fears for lawmakers and users.
That means that while trying to understand whether TikTok can effectively protect U.S. consumers under a Chinese owner, lawmakers will also have to grapple with how best to address consumer harms across the industry.
Conversations with lawmakers, congressional aides and outside experts ahead of the hearing reveal the difficult line the government needs to walk to protect U.S. national security while avoiding excessive action against a single app and violating First Amendment rights.
Evaluating a potential ban
There’s little appetite in Washington to accept the potential risks that TikTok’s ownership by Chinese company ByteDance poses to U.S. national security. Congress has already banned the app on government devices and some states have made similar moves.
The interagency panel tasked with reviewing national security risks stemming from ByteDance’s ownership has threatened a ban if the company won’t sell its stake in the app.
Still, an outright ban raises its own concerns, potentially missing the forest for the trees.
“If members focus solely on the prospect of a ban or a forced sale without addressing some of the more pervasive issues, particularly those facing children and younger users, shared by TikTok and U.S.-based social media companies, I think that would be a mistake,” Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., a committee member, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday. Trahan said members should ask about national security risks of the app, but those questions should be substantive.
A TikTok advertisement at Union Station in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 22, 2023.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., who chairs the E&C subcommittee on innovation, data and commerce, said he and many of his colleagues are going into the hearing open to solutions.
“We have to be open-minded and deliberate,” Bilirakis told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. “But at the same time, time is of the essence.”
If the government moves for a ban where the concerns could reasonably be mitigated with a less restrictive measure, it could pose First Amendment issues, according to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
“A ban here is in some ways under-inclusive because it would be focused just on TikTok or a small number of platforms, when in fact many other platforms are collecting this kind of information as well,” Jaffer said. “And in other ways, it would be over-broad because there are less restrictive ways that the government could achieve its ends.”
While some might wonder if cutting off Americans’ access to TikTok is really such a violation of rights, Jaffer said the public should consider it in terms of the U.S. government’s authority to decide which media Americans can access.
“It’s a good thing that if the government wants to ban Americans from accessing foreign media, including foreign social media… it has to carry a heavy burden in court,” Jaffer said.
Many lawmakers agree that the government should make its case more clearly to the American public for why a ban is necessary, should it go that route. The bipartisan RESTRICT Act recently introduced in the Senate, for example, would require such an explanation, to the extent possible, when the government wants to limit foreign-owned technology for national security reasons.
Trahan said she could support legislation similar to the RESTRICT Act in the House, which would create a process to mitigate national security risks of technologies from foreign adversary countries, but passing such a bill would still not be enough.
“The message that I want folks to hear is that we cannot afford to pass this legislation or something like it, watch the administration ban or force the sale of TikTok and declare victory in the fight to rein in the abuses of dominant Big Tech companies,” Trahan said. “I think the conversation right now about a ban certainly threatens to let Big Tech companies off the hook, and it’s on Congress not to fall into that trap.”
Even if the U.S. successfully banned TikTok or forced it to spin off from ByteDance, there’s no way to know for sure that any earlier-collected data is out of reach of the Chinese government.
“If that divestment would occur, how do you segregate the code bases between ByteDance and TikTok?” asked John Lash, who advises clients on risk mitigation agreements with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) but hasn’t worked for TikTok or ByteDance. “And how is the U.S. government going to get comfortable that the asset, TikTok, which is hypothetically sold, is free of any type of backdoor that was either maliciously inserted or just weaknesses in code, errors that occur regularly in how code is structured?”
“I think the concern is valid. My big issue is that genie’s sort of out of the bottle,” Eric Cole, a cybersecurity consultant who began his career as a hacker for the Central Intelligence Agency, said of the data security fears. “At this point, it’s so embedded that even if they were successful in banning Tiktok altogether, that the damage is done.”
Addressing industry-wide concerns
Thursday’s hearing will feature several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle calling for comprehensive privacy reform, like the kind the panel passed last year but never made it to the floor for a vote.
Those calls serve as recognition that many of the concerns about TikTok, apart from its ownership by a Chinese company, are shared by other prominent tech platforms headquartered in the U.S.
Both Trahan and Bilirakis mentioned the need for privacy reform as a more systemic solution to the issues raised by TikTok. Both are especially concerned about the social media company’s potentially harmful impacts on children and said they would drill down on TikTok’s protections in the hearing.
TikTok has touted a complex plan known as Project Texas to help ease U.S. concerns over its ownership. Under the plan, it will base its U.S. data operations domestically and allow its code to be reviewed and sent to the app stores by outside parties.
A TikTok advertisement at Union Station in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 22, 2023.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Chew plans to tell Congress that he strongly prioritizes the safety of users, and particularly teens, that TikTok will firewall U.S. user data from “unauthorized foreign access,” it “will not be manipulated by any government” and it will be transparent and allow independent monitors to assess its compliance.
Experts and even some lawmakers acknowledge that Project Texas offers a step forward on some aspects of consumer protection they’ve pushed for in the tech industry more broadly.
“TikTok is in a really unique position right now to take some positive steps on issues that a lot of top American companies have fallen behind and frankly even regressed on whether it’s protecting kids or embracing transparency,” Trahan said. While she believes there are still many questions TikTok needs to answer about the adequacy of Project Texas, Trahan said she is “hopeful” about the company’s professed “openness to stronger transparency mechanisms.”
Lawmakers and aides who spoke with CNBC ahead of the hearing emphasized that comprehensive privacy legislation will be necessary regardless of what action is taken against TikTok in particular. That’s how a similar situation in the future may be prevented, and a way to hold U.S. companies to higher standards as well.
But given federal digital privacy protections don’t currently exist, Lash said the U.S. should consider what it would mean if Project Texas were to go away.
“In lieu of comprehensive federal data privacy regulation in the United States, which is needed, does Project Texas give the best available option right now to protect national security?” asked Lash, whose advisory is one of a small group of firms with the expertise to advise the company on an agreement should a deal go through. “And does it continue if ByteDance is forced to divest their interests?”
The plan appears to address the issues that lawmakers are concerned about, said Lash, but what it can’t address are “the theoretical risks around may happen, could happen as it relates to the application.”
“I would say, based on what I’ve seen out in the public, it does seem to comprehensively address a lot of the real technical risks that may be arising,” he said.
Still, policymakers appear skeptical that Project Texas reaches that bar.
An aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee who was only authorized to speak on background told reporters earlier this week that TikTok’s risk mitigation plans were “purely marketing.” Another aide for the committee noted that even if the U.S. can be assured the data is secure, it’s impossible to comb through all the existing code for vulnerabilities.
E&C Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., supports a ban to address the immediate risks TikTok poses as well as comprehensive privacy legislation that passed through the committee last Congress to prevent repeat situations, according to E&C aides.
TikTok’s strategy
In the lead-up to the hearing, TikTok has turned to creators and users to share their support for the app and help lawmakers understand the unique features that make it an important source of income, open expression and education for many Americans.
On Tuesday, Chew posted a video on TikTok touting its 150 million monthly active users in the U.S. and appealed to them to leave comments about what they want their lawmakers to know about why they love TikTok.
The company has also found an ally in its efforts to fight a ban in Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a TikTok user himself who discovered the power of the app to build connections with constituents while vlogging the lengthy Speaker of the House election.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) speaks at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol Building on February 02, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
On Wednesday, Bowman held a press conference with dozens of creators, opposing the ban and saying rhetoric around the app is a sort of “red scare” pushed primarily by Republicans. He said he supports comprehensive legislation addressing privacy issues across the industry, rather than singling out one platform. Bowman noted lawmakers haven’t received a bipartisan congressional briefing from the administration on national security risks stemming from TikTok.
“Let’s not have a dishonest conversation,” Bowman said. “Let’s not be racist toward China and express our xenophobia when it comes to TikTok. Because American companies have done tremendous harm to American people.”
Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., joined Bowman and the creators, announcing their opposition to a ban. Garcia, who is openly gay, said it’s important that young queer creators “are able to find themselves in this space, share information and feel comfortable, in some cases come out.”
“Honestly it’s done best on the TikTok platform than any other social media platform that currently exists, certainly in the United States,” Garcia said.
Creators at the event on Wednesday shared the opportunities that TikTok has afforded them that aren’t available in the same way on other apps. Several creators who spoke with CNBC said they have other social media channels but have far fewer followers on them, due in part to the easy discoverability built into TikTok’s design.
“I’ve been on social media for probably ten years,” said David Ma, a Brooklyn-based content creator, director and filmmaker on TikTok. But it wasn’t until he joined TikTok that his following grew exponentially, to more than 1 million people. “It’s given me visibility with people that are going to fundamentally change the trajectory of my career.”
Tim Martin, a college football coach in North Dakota who posts about sports on TikTok to a following of 1 million users, estimated 70% of his income comes from the app. Martin credits the TikTok algorithm with getting his videos in front of users who truly care about what he has to share, which has helped him grow his following there far more than on Instagram.
But TikTok’s attempt to shift the narrative to positive stories from creators and users may still fall flat for some lawmakers.
Bilirakis said the strategy is “not resonating with our colleagues. Definitely not with me.” That’s because he hears other anecdotes about constituents’ encounters with the app that make him worry for teens’ safety.
“I do think there’s a chance that it may not necessarily have the impact that TikTok is looking for,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst for Insider Intelligence. “It’s more evidence of how firmly entrenched the app is in the digital lives of Americans, which isn’t necessarily going to help convince us lawmakers that TikTok can’t be used or isn’t being used to influence public opinion.”
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, signs the guestbook on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg may be the most famous college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Field is the latest, after his design startup Figma soared in its stock market debut this week.
The two entrepreneurs have something else in common: close ties to Peter Thiel.
Zuckerberg got his first outside check for Facebook from Thiel in 2004, soon before leaving Harvard University to build his social network in Silicon Valley. Facebook went public in 2012, the same year that Field scored a Thiel Fellowship, which gives money “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 people have been selected since its inception in 2011.
Field, now 33, was part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a group of 20 entrepreneurs who each took home $100,000. The program doubled that sum earlier this year. Like Zuckerberg, Field came to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
On Thursday, Figma’s stock price more than tripled in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. It rose again on Friday, wrapping up the week with a fully diluted market cap above $71 billion. Field’s stake is worth about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is now the world’s third-richest person, with a net worth of over $260 billion.
While the contours of Field’s story may sound familiar, he’s a very different kind of character.
“Dylan is, by far, the most humble billionaire I’ve ever met,” said Joshua Browder, CEO of legal services startup DoNotPay and a former Thiel fellow.
Mike Gibson, who used to help run the fellows program as vice president for grants at the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, contrasts Field with another tech luminary.
“He’s kind of like the anti-Steve Jobs,” said Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a venture firm that prides itself on investing in dropouts. “When it comes to Jobs’ legend as this hard-charging a–hole, Dylan is the opposite.”
The Apple co-founder, who dropped out of college after one semester, died of cancer in 2011, as his company was on its way to becoming the most valuable business in the world.
Field was poised to officially enter the billionaire ranks almost three years ago. With Figma having emerged as a leader in web-based tools for designing apps and websites, Adobe agreed to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. But regulators in the U.K. said the tie-up would’ve hurt competition, and the companies scrapped the transaction in late 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.
Figma’s IPO this week represented not only a massive valuation markup for the company but also served as a banner event for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs since the market cratered in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates.
“The most important thing to remind myself of, the team of, is share price is a moment in time,” Field told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “We’re going to see all sorts of behavior probably today, over the weeks ahead.”
Figma declined to make Field available for an interview for this story.
Field’s trek back to the Bay Area, where he’d grown up, began with a TechCrunch article about the fellowship. He submitted his application two hours before the deadline, on New Year’s Eve of 2011, while he was a junior at Brown. He left out his SAT scores.
“It is my belief that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and can easily be gamed,” he wrote in his application, which he posted on LinkedIn years later. In the essay section, he was asked to offer a highly controversial take.
“Chocolate is repulsive,” he wrote. “Even the smell of it makes me want to vomit.”
In response to a question about how he was going to change the world, Field said he was going to build better software for drones, and that he would “cofound a company with the smartest programmer I know and work on this problem.”
That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a teaching assistant for some of Field’s courses at Brown. Wallace was technologically gifted, earning the nickname “computer Jesus,” or CJ. But he was already 20, meaning he was too old to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship.
Field scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to leave his academic pursuits. The pair moved into a small apartment in Palo Alto, California.
The drone software plan had gone out the window. Wallace wanted to develop something related to WebGL, a graphics rendering system for web browsers. A year later, they were showing investors a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the movement of a ball in a pool of water.
‘Anyone can be creative’
The obvious competitive target was Adobe, which was ending development of Fireworks, an app design product that it acquired with the 2005 Macromedia purchase.
“We thought, ‘Wait, maybe there’s an opportunity here,'” Field said on a podcast earlier this year.
“What we’re trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative, by creating free, simple creative tools in the browser,” Field said in a 2012 interview for a CNBC special on the Thiel Fellowship.
In 2013, the founders started talking with investors about raising a seed round. Field showed the pool water demo to John Lilly of Greylock Partners at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had previously been CEO of Mozilla, where an engineer developed software that led to WebGL. He was impressed with what he was seeing, but he didn’t think it had much economic potential.
Figma took on seed funding from Index Ventures and other investors. The founders assembled a small group of employees at an office in Palo Alto. Progress was slow. Early versions of the product failed to impress potential users. Field was micromanaging.
When Figma would show the product to companies in the Bay Area, reception wasn’t always great. Stress was building. Lilly, who ended up leading Figma’s Series A round in 2014, came to the company’s San Francisco headquarters the following August as struggles were mounting. Employees wanted changes.
“We both heard it,” said Danny Rimer, the Index partner who led the seed funding, referring to conversations he and Lilly were having with staffers about Field.
“We sat down with him and explained to him the situation,” Rimer said. “We heard it and we sort of said, ‘Look, this is an impasse. You’re going to have to adapt and change.’ And he heard it and he changed. I think that’s such a great character trait of Dylan, is to hear the information, be objective about it, process it and accept it and act accordingly, if it makes sense.”
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup’s Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022.
Figma
Around that time, Sho Kuwamoto joined the company. Kuwamoto brought with him experience from Macromedia and Adobe. Four months later, Figma launched its debut product in a free preview.
Field got involved with users. He replied to people on social media who were posting about Figma, telling them they were receiving access to the preview. He also sought out prominent designers.
Companies like Coda and Uber became early adopters. Some designers were excited by the idea of sharing documents by copying and pasting a URL, instead of having to deal with versions, formats and updates. Figma operated in the cloud, providing all the necessary computing infrastructure, so users didn’t need their own powerful graphics cards.
It wasn’t until September 2016 that Figma made the design editor available for free to the general public and made it possible for multiple designers to make changes in a single file simultaneously. That became the killer feature.
The software started gaining traction inside Microsoft. But there was an issue. Microsoft feared that Figma’s lack of a clear business model might lead to a burial in the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design executive at the software giant, visited Figma’s headquarters to deliver the message, Field told CNBC in 2022.
“Look, we’re all worried you’re going to die as a company,” Field recalled Friedman telling him.
The following year, Figma introduced its first paid tier.
By the time venture stalwart Sequoia Capital came on board in 2019, Figma was a hot commodity, raising its Series C round at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed said some of his firm’s portfolio companies had started migrating to Figma, and founders were using it for pitch decks.
“Companies often will show prototypes in board meetings of new products they want to build, and so the first thing we saw a lot of Figma links for was that,” Reed said in an interview this week.
“It was a very easy investment,” Reed said. “We went through some of our old investment voting data. I think Figma might have been the highest vote we ever had for an investment.”
Sequoia’s extensive roster of winners over the decades includes Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Zoom and WhatsApp.
The Adobe period
Financial analysts covering Adobe started asking about Figma. Adobe, which had released the XD app for user experience design, responded, adding the startup to its official list of competitors.
But Adobe’s market capitalization sat above $170 billion, and Figma wasn’t even a “unicorn,” a status reserved for startups worth at least $1 billion. Field told Forbes that some job candidates were hesitant to join because of the modest valuation. In 2020, the company raised a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.
Then came Covid. Offices closed. The world went remote overnight. Figma’s collaboration capability suddenly became critical to the way many more people worked.
“We asked ourselves: how can we help teams connect, have fun and enter a flow state during the earliest stages of the design process?” Field later wrote on Twitter.
The result was FigJam, a digital whiteboard that became Figma’s second product, and represented a key step toward diversification.
The Adobe noise continued to get louder. In 2020, Field had discussions with Adobe executive Scott Belsky about a partnership or acquisition, but Field chose to stay the course. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Field about a possible deal in early 2021, but again the Figma CEO demurred, opting to raise a round at a $10 billion valuation.
“Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe,” Field wrote in a 2021 tweet.
The environment quickly changed. By early 2022, with the Fed lifting interest rates to fight inflation, investors were selling out of high-growth tech and rotating into businesses with predictable profits. Sequoia was encouraging its startups to reduce costs.
David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles, October 2022.
Adobe
Belsky again approached Field in April of that year, this time alongside David Wadhwani, who was leading Adobe’s digital media business.
“Mr. Field expressed openness to understanding the terms of a potential acquisition of Figma by Adobe, and Mr. Field, Mr. Belsky and Mr. Wadhwani continued their discussion of the potential benefits of a combination the following week,” Adobe stated in a regulatory filing.
Field was considering the implications of the rise of artificial intelligence.
“Look, when we did the deal with Adobe in the first place, my head space in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. This is clearly exponential as a technology. I don’t know what this does to us. Is this one-tenth our market, is it 10x our market? What does it mean for creatives and designers?” Field said in an interview with The Verge last year. “And I was like, it’s better to team up in this world with Adobe and to navigate this together and to figure this out together than it is to go it alone.”
In September 2022, Adobe agreed to buy Figma for about $20 billion, announcing that Field would remain in charge of his part of the business and would report to Wadhwani.
“Adobe has a unique opportunity to usher in a world of collaborative creativity,” Narayen told analysts on a conference call the day of the agreement. “In my conversations with Dylan at Figma, it became abundantly clear that together we could accelerate this new vision, delivering great value to our customers and shareholders.”
That opportunity never came. An intensifying regulatory environment in the U.S. and Europe had made sizable tech deals more burdensome. Adobe was suddenly in the crosshairs, and the transaction was hitting repeated hurdles.
“We’re worried this deal could stifle innovation and lead to higher costs for companies that rely on Figma and Adobe’s digital tools — as they cease to compete to provide customers with new and better products,” Sorcha O’Carroll, an official at the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, said in a press release in mid-2023.
Around that time, Field announced another step toward product diversification by introducing Dev Mode, which turns Figma designs into source code that can serve as a starting point for software developers. The reveal came at Figma’s Config user conference in San Francisco, which attracted 8,000 attendees.
The U.K.’s investigation dragged on for months. Field was pulling double duty running the company and engaging with regulators. Adobe had said it expected to complete the deal in 2023, but time was running out. Regulators were proposing remedies that the parties didn’t like.
“Even toward the final months, there were these moments of, ‘Oh, this is going to go through,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Field told The Verge. “And obviously at the end, there’s a mutual understanding of,’ This decision has been made for us and let’s call it.'”
On a Sunday in December 2023, Field gathered board members for a 10-minute call, informing them that the deal was off. The official statement followed early on Monday morning.
“It’s frustrating and sad that we’re not able to complete this,” Field told The New York Times.
Not everyone in Field’s orbit saw it that way. Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra, a friend of Field’s and longtime Figma user, said the whole ordeal was having an impact.
“You could see it in his face,” Mehrotra said of Field, adding that he was relieved when he learned Figma would remain independent. “He was getting older right in front of us.”
But Figma had some business concerns. Its net dollar retention rate, a measurement of the company’s ability to sell more to existing customers, slid from 159% in the first quarter of 2023 to 122% by the end of the year, according to Figma’s IPO prospectus. Figma chalked it up to a tough comparison from the year before, thanks to the launch of FigJam, and economic uncertainty that caused some clients to reduce seat counts. The retention rate bounced back to 132% in the first quarter of 2025.
During the 2023 winter holidays, Field considered ways to rally the workforce. After the new year, he announced internally that Figma would give extra equity to employees who joined or received promotions following the acquisition announcement, because the valuation was going back down to $10 billion. He said any employees who wished to leave would get three months of severance, with no hard feelings.
Fewer than 5% of staffers took him up on the offer.
Pivot to prompting
As Figma pursues a go-it-alone strategy, it faces an existential question: Is the company ready for a future dominated by AI?
In May, Field took the stage at Figma’s user conference before 8,500 attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wearing a black “Config 2025” T-shirt. He walked the crowd through a slew of new products, including Figma Make, which draws on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a large language model from AI startup Anthropic.
“With Figma Make, you could take an existing design and prompt your way to a fully coded prototype,” Field said.
A product manager, Holly Li, came up for a demo. At a laptop, she copied the design for a music player in the Figma editor and pasted it into a chat box, typing instructions to rotate the album art like a record while a song is playing. She showed apps created with Figma Make, eliciting some cheers, and returned to the demo.
“Okay. This time, the model had a little bit of difficulty, but that’s okay,” she said. The cloudy background image from the original design was gone, and track names became difficult to read. The crowd was silent. She brought up a working version in a different browser tab.
The feature went live last week. Mehrotra said it’s off to a good start.
Other products in the market were built with generative AI in mind. They include Lovable, Miro’s Uizard and Vercel’s v0. Brent Stewart, an analyst at Gartner, said that Figma is “utterly, utterly dominant” in design but that some of the offerings from other companies look more impressive.
Andrew Chan, a former Figma software engineer, wrote in a blog post last year that “an interesting and ongoing question is whether Figma can repeat the success it had in design with other products.”
Nadia Eldeib, a former Lyft product manager and CEO of startup CodeYam, tried Figma Make before the broad launch and put it up against Lovable and v0. Writing on Substack, she said it appeared to be at an earlier stage.
It’s the sort of feedback that Field will read and send to his employees, known as Figmates. He reads support tickets and mentions of Figma’s name on X, formerly Twitter. He took no time off to address such matters on the very day that his company was conducting its IPO, ultimately pricing shares $1 above the expected range.
Yianni Mathioudakis, a creative director in Maryland, tagged Figma in a post on Wednesday, asking if anyone had found a way to take a Figma Make design and bring it into the main design editor.
“Hi Yianni, we are working towards this and very excited about what it will unlock!” Field replied. “Please keep the Make feedback coming!”
A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
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