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ACCRA, Ghana — Block CEO Jack Dorsey and his top brass descended on Accra for the inaugural Africa Bitcoin Conference in December to talk about one of the most potentially disruptive and transformative alternatives to the continent’s existing financial system: bitcoin.

Since its inception in 2008, this unfamiliar form of money has alternatively been disdained as an absurdly complex toy for libertarian techies, a legalized form of gambling, a speculative bet to get rich quick, and a vehicle for criminals and fraudsters to obscure the origins of their ill-begotten gains. 

But this parallel financial system can also serve a tangible social good, offering an onramp to the financial system for people who would otherwise be left out. In countries where the vast majority of the population is unbanked, national currencies are no longer a safe store of value, remittances comprise a hefty portion of GDP, and international sanctions complicate connections to the global economy, a virtual currency that doesn’t require an intermediary to approve transactions can be a vital lifeline for survival. 

As cryptocurrency continues to rise in prominence and becomes a growing flashpoint for regulators, Dorsey and his deputies are providing an essential counternarrative: Bitcoin brings financial power to people who would otherwise have none. 

“It doesn’t matter to me if the price goes down or up, because I can still use bitcoin as a vehicle to move money around the world instantaneously,” said Mike Brock, the CEO of TBD at Block, a unit which focuses on cryptocurrency and decentralized finance.

“I can exchange dollars for bitcoin and then bitcoin for Brazilian rial. There is a market for bitcoin in every corner of the world today,” continued Brock.

A broken financial system

Moving money in Africa is an expensive and complicated process.

Commercial bank branch access is limited, especially for people living in remote and rural areas. Digital banking options are also limited. Tack on rampant hyperinflation, widespread government corruption, and capital controls trapping domestic cash in banks, and money can stop making sense altogether.

“If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border,” explains Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful.

Part of the problem stems from the continent’s quasi-colonial payment framework, in which roughly 80% of cross-border payments originating from African banks are processed offshore, mostly in the U.S. or Europe. That translates to higher costs and processing times that are sometimes measured in weeks.

Then there’s mobile money, which has been around since the early 2000s. Think of it like an electronic wallet tied to a phone number that does not require a smartphone or data to operate. Users can pay bills and shop with their phone through SMS texting, instead of having to rely on traditional banking options.

Africa’s mobile money transactions rose 39% to more than $700 billion in 2021, according to data from the GSM Association, a non-profit representing mobile network operators worldwide. World Bank data shows that account ownership at a financial institution — or via a mobile money service provider — has more than doubled in the last decade, rising to 55% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.

An employee uses a Nokia 1200 mobile phone inside an M-Pesa store in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, April 14, 2013.

Trevor Snap | Bloomberg | Getty Images

But even as adoption proliferates, mobile money users don’t get the perks of legacy banking, including earning interest on banked savings and building up a credit score based on a history of spending. Interoperability on the continent also remains a major issue with this alternative way of banking.

“The entire banking system in Africa is completely and utterly broken, even amongst the mobile money providers, the telcos,” said Youssef from Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace where users can directly buy and sell tokens with one another.

“Two thousand payment networks and only 2% of them talk to each other. That number continues to grow. It’s not getting better, it’s actually getting worse,” continued Youssef.

Companies like Western Union and MoneyGram offer an expansive physical network of storefronts around the world designed to move money for those who are unbanked. That cash network was extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build, which is why there aren’t a lot of direct competitors. It is also why those cash transfers often incur substantial fees.

Bitcoin could eliminate all these intermediaries, allowing citizens to send digital payments directly to one another, without relying on credit and without incurring multiple settlement fees along the way.

“We’re going to move to a model where we can make payments without IOUs, or credit, or promises, or fiat,” said Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, an organization that works with activists from authoritarian regimes around the world. “It’s literally like sending a piece of gold or a $20 bill instantly somewhere else.”

“If you can get access to the internet, you can settle bitcoin payments,” said Brock. “And the government can’t do anything about it.”

Dorsey points to the example of what happened in Nigeria during the protests against the brutality of the country’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad — a movement referred to as #EndSARS.

“The Nigerian government went to various bank corps to stop protesters from receiving money — which bitcoin made up for,” Dorsey said in Accra. “So our whole reason for being as a company is solving the same problem that bitcoin will ultimately solve for everyone in the world.”

Africa Bitcoin Conference delves into real-world use cases for crypto

Moving money on the bitcoin blockchain at its base layer has its own challenges. At times of peak demand, fees will often spike higher, and if a user is unwilling to pay a premium for the transaction, they may have to wait for more blocks of transactions to get confirmed before their transfer goes through.

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network helps alleviate both of those problems by slashing the cost of transactions to virtually zero and enabling nearly instantaneous cash payments around the planet – making bitcoin a more effective payment rail. This so-called “layer two” technology is built on top of bitcoin’s main chain, in part because bitcoiners are conservative about introducing changes to the base layer, for fear of opening it up to hacks or other mischief.

Yellow Card — Africa’s largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange run by CEO Chris Maurice — is also looking to embed this layer two technology into the platform, in order to drive down the price of transactions to virtually zero. Currently, the exchange doesn’t charge a commission for transactions, but network fees can be pretty steep when a lot of trades are happening at once.

“It’ll have a pretty big impact to our customers, because a lot of them are very price sensitive,” says Justin Poiroux, the co-founder and CTO of Yellow Card.

Yellow Card’s plan is still in its infancy, but Poiroux tells CNBC that he thinks the Lightning Network could ultimately provide a lot of value for its retail customers.

Bitnob CEO Bernard Parah and Cash App’s crypto product lead, Miles Suter, at the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Accra, Ghana.

Bernard Parah

Because Lightning offers a universal monetary language, money can travel around the world between any Lightning-enabled bitcoin wallet. Someone who uses a platform like Block’s Cash App — a regulated, American financial product with 51 million monthly transacting users which integrated with the Lightning Network in Feb. 2022 — can pay any Lightning invoice in the world instantly.

“It’s a new way of doing business. It’s a different paradigm entirely,” said Gladstein.

The crypto product lead at Cash App, Miles Suter, believes that a big part of bitcoin’s utility is how it gets around broken and convoluted payment systems that don’t talk to each other.

“At Cash App in particular, we’ve always been really interested in taking bitcoin beyond just being seen an investment and bringing day-to-day utility to it,” Suter told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference.

“In many ways, the people on the African continent are already doing that with the tools they have,” continued Suter.

Sending cash with Lightning

Bernard Parah is a 30-year-old entrepreneur living in Jos, Nigeria, about a five hour drive from the capital city of Abuja. He’s the CEO of Bitnob, an app that lets users across Africa buy, save, and invest in bitcoin. Bitnob is SMS-based and piggybacks on the mobile money system, making it easier for people to send money directly into bank accounts and mobile money wallets in African countries.

Parah recently teamed up with Strike, a Lightning Network payments platform, to launch a feature called “Send Globally” that allows Americans to transfer money to people living in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya.

It uses local fiat cash on either side of the transaction, but bitcoin is used under the hood as the pipeline to jump money over the border. The end user never touches the cryptocurrency themselves.

“We’re able to settle into bank accounts or mobile money accounts, without the recipients having to interact with bitcoin themselves,” Parah tells CNBC.

“Over time, we’ve seen that there are still people who really don’t understand how to use bitcoin; who don’t care about bitcoin. What they do care about is their problems getting solved,” continued Parah.

Bitnob CEO Bernard Parah and Strike CEO Jack Mallers announcing the launch of ‘Send Globally’ on stage at the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Accra, Ghana.

Bernard Parah

It feels like a wire transfer or a Venmo payment, according to Strike CEO Jack Mallers.

“It’s instant. There’s no debt. There’s no credit. There’s no delays,” explains Mallers.

The model works because Parah and Mallers are willing to take on the liability associated with the transfer by holding cash in escrow on either end of the exchange. 

Once the money is received in Nigeria, Bitnob — which is a regulated entity with connections to the local banks — will take that bitcoin and turn it into their local currency.

“It’s just two regulated entities communicating over the language of bitcoin and cutting out excess fees,” said Suter. “I think that’s revolutionary.”

Mallers says that they offer more competitive foreign exchange rates by using bitcoin as a price-setting intermediary, a sort of new world reserve currency.

“The rate that we got was actually 60% better than the traditional forex market rate,” said Mallers. “The way to actually think about how we’re achieving forex if we clear through bitcoin is, ‘I have dollars. How many bitcoin can I get for my dollars? And then how many naira can I get for my bitcoin?'” said Mallers.

“It’s acting as the most liquid, accessible, global instrument for us to clear and settle value amongst each other,” he said.

The arrangement also offers a few big ancillary benefits, including interoperability with payment apps around the world that have tens of millions of users.

Block’s Suter explained that Cash App could theoretically interoperate with Bitnob.

“We’re only live in the U.S. right now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speak to Bitnob in Nigeria and transfer value instantly and for free across these borders,” Suter said of Cash App.

Meeting customers where they are

South African developer Kgothatso Ngako built a custodial lightning wallet called Machankura.

Kgothatso Ngako

South African developer Kgothatso Ngako, who goes by KG, has integrated the Lightning Network into the GSM network, combining the best of a few worlds, in a larger effort to meet customers where they are.

“My focus is giving people without an internet connection the ability to send or receive bitcoin,” Ngako said.

KG calls his custodial Lightning wallet “Machankura” — South African slang for money. Whereas most Lightning transactions today require a smartphone and data, Ngako’s service integrates lightning via Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, or USSD, which is the protocol that mobile money runs on. (It is similar to HTTP, or HyperText Transport Protocol, the protocol on which the web was built.)

Ngako tells CNBC that he currently has around 3,000 users spread across eight countries, with a concentration in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria. In his home market of South Africa, there are strict rules around currency exchange, which make his product even more appealing to some users looking to move their money abroad.

“The South African Reserve Bank regulates the cross-border flow of capital — including the exchange of currency — to and from South Africa. You need some form of approval to convert ZAR into foreign currency,” said Ernest Marais, partner at Johannesburg law firm, Tabacks.

KG’s Machankura is compatible with any Lightning wallet on the planet. In practice, this means that someone with the Cash App in San Francisco, for example, could instantly send bitcoin via Lightning to the phone number of someone with a data-less, basic phone living in a remote part of Uganda.

Ngako’s project does face some risks, including regulatory blowback.

Marais tells CNBC that because the South African Reserve Bank cannot regulate the cross-border flow of cryptocurrency, it is considered to be illegal and a criminal offense — though crypto regulation largely remains nebulous across most of the continent.

“All African central banks, except for Central African Republic, have made notices stating that they don’t issue bitcoin and hence they don’t regulate it,” counters Ngako, adding that a bitcoin transaction cannot be considered a cross-border exchange as bitcoin transactions aren’t regulated within the central bank’s institution.

But the rules are confusing for everyone involved.

“The actual location of crypto assets is an anomaly. At what point does it leave the country?” continued Marais.

Ultimately, Ngako believes that once Machankura begins to scale, it will be a major driver of bitcoin adoption across the continent. To that end, Ngako is raising money and building — a common refrain among the entrepreneurs on the ground in Accra.

As Dorsey said in Africa, “More and more mass adoption will, in my belief, take away all the oxygen” from governments attempting to control behavior through financial oppression.

“So what do we do? We build, we build, we build, we build, we build, they can’t stop us. And that’s what’s important.”

Africa Bitcoin Conference kicks off as FTX collapse shakes confidence in crypto

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Figma CEO’s path from college dropout and Thiel fellow to tech billionaire

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Figma CEO's path from college dropout and Thiel fellow to tech billionaire

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.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field

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.

Dylan Field says he’s strongly considering dropping out of Brown University for Peter Thiel fellowship

“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!”

WATCH: Figma more than triples in NYSE debut

Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33

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Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Tesla must pay portion of 9 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.

Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.

The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.

Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”

Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.

Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:

“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.

Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.

This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”

The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.

The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.

The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.

The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.

Read the jury’s verdict below.

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump’s new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump's new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

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%.

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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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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