Seychelles-based OKX announced on Tuesday that it is relaunching the U.S. version of its crypto exchange and unveiled a new wallet for American users to store as well as trade cryptocurrencies. The company also named Roshan Robert, a longtime employee of Barclays, as its U.S. CEO and revealed it would locate its U.S. regional headquarters in San Jose, California.

“It is not just the rebrand. The entire technology interface, everything has changed,” said Robert, who was recently an executive at the crypto prime broker Hidden Road, which was acquired by Ripple for $1.25 billion in April.

OKX’s renewed focus on the U.S. follows a settlement the exchange’s international entity reached with the Department of Justice in February. Prosecutors alleged that OKX failed to implement adequate anti-money laundering processes and solicited U.S. customers even though its international entity wasn’t registered in the States. As part of the agreement, OKX paid a $500 million fine, pled guilty to one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and agreed to pay for an external compliance consultant through February 2027.

“For over seven years, OKX knowingly violated anti-money laundering laws and avoided implementing required policies to prevent criminals from abusing our financial system,” Matthew Podolsky, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, said in a statement announcing the settlement.

“There were no allegations of customer harm, no charges against any company employee and no government appointed monitor as part of the settlement,” OKX said in a blog post.

The exchange’s U.S. relaunch also comes amid a more favorable regulatory environment for crypto under President Donald Trump. Robert, the U.S. CEO, said OKX’s plans to increase its U.S. presence predates Trump’s second term. He started talking with the crypto exchange in the summer of 2024 and was officially brought on in September. “We were preparing our compliance infrastructure, our risk management infrastructure for the last year and a half or so,” he added.

That said, Robert welcomes the Trump administration’s less aggressive approach to crypto. “The rulemaking will take some time, but there is a path that we can see,” he said.

As Robert steers the new, relaunched OKX U.S., he’s facing stiff competition from incumbents Coinbase and Kraken. However, he believes that the market in the U.S. isn’t zero sum and thinks that younger generations’ appetite for risky crypto bets will grow the pie. “The whole digital asset market is an expanding universe,” he said.

Hong Fang, OKX’s global president, previously oversaw OKX’s U.S. entity, which was formerly named OKcoin. 

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Figma, the design software unicorn, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering more than a year after a $20 billion acquisition bid by Adobe fell apart due to antitrust concerns.  

The filing signals some optimism for public debuts despite the current market turmoil set off by President Trump’s push to implement tariffs. The uncertainty has rattled investors and sown doubts about the near-term viability of many IPOs. 

Figma on Tuesday announced it had submitted a draft of its IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, but did not publicly release the full document, which would normally provide financial details about its operations.

The valuation Figma ultimately seeks in the public markets will be something to watch. In 2021, amid a low interest rate-fueled venture capital boom, Figma was valued in its Series E at $10 billion. In 2024, Figma conducted a tender offer that valued the company at $12.5 billion. 

Figma’s VC backers include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, and numerous others. 

Figma has about 1,600 employees and millions of customers, including Airbnb, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce, Spotify, Square, Stripe, and Zoom. The business is also international, with 85% of its users outside the U.S. 

Figma publicly shared some financial details in May 2024, when the company told CNBC that it had $600 million in annual recurring revenue. ARR is an important benchmark for many companies, as it measures predictable revenue that’s usually tied to long-term contracts and subscription-based revenue. 

Figma, founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, has made headlines in recent years, both around high expectations for when it would file for an IPO and for how it would fare in the aftermath of Adobe’s thwarted mega-acquisition. (Field and Wallace met while students at Brown University.)

In 2022, Adobe announced plans to acquire Figma, but faced intense regulatory scrutiny, including from the European Commission. In 2023, the two companies backed away from the deal, and Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee. 

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As former presidents of American colleges and universities who care deeply about the contribution of higher education to our country, we call on the Trump administration to end the destructive attacks on colleges and universities and establish a constructive dialogue with board trustees and presidents over university governance and educational guidelines. The federal government’s aggressive threats to withdraw funding and the ideological conditions it has named for reinstating withdrawn funds—before formal investigation, hearing, or reporting—are illegal under Title VI the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and unconstitutional under the First Amendment. These threats directly imperil the core mission of colleges and universities: to prioritize open dialogue, free inquiry, academic integrity, and the unfettered pursuit of truth. Our nation’s colleges and universities have served as engines of creativity and innovation, contributing exponentially more than their costs to the prosperity, safety, security, and well-being of Americans and our nation. 

We support board trustees and presidents as they collectively defend the values and ideals of higher education; resist and legally challenge unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance; protect departments and programs against political threats; preserve science and other research from funding cuts by providing legal and financial support to affected scholars and research units; and promote the exercise of free expression and a culture of civil discourse. We ask the American public to productively engage in community forums and find solutions to the challenges facing their alma maters as well as their regional and local academic institutions.

We recognize that recent events on college campuses raise legitimate concerns about the independent mission and governance of these schools. Academic institutions should never insist that any student or scholar display ideological purity. Nor should they ever be externally pressured to do so. Matters of social justice or partisan politics must not take precedence over the core mission of colleges and universities, namely the pursuit of truth, advancement of knowledge, and education of responsible citizens.

However, arbitrary assaults on higher education—bypassing legally required due process—have an extremely chilling effect on campus life and undermine the unique contributions of higher education to the nation’s economic vitality, to U.S. technological leadership, to the cultural pillars of our society, to health care, and to the quality of life in communities around the nation. The economic contributions of these institutions to American GDP underpin the $7 trillion in digital transactions that occur each year; the biotech sector’s $3 trillion annual contribution to U.S. GDP; and the $5+ trillion in annual investments to AI and other emerging technologies. Together, these industries, each closely linked to academic programming, contribute nearly half of American GDP, account for the majority of annual GDP growth, and amount to twice the spending of the federal government. The trade surplus from higher education accounts for nearly 14% of total U.S. services trade surplus—comparable to the combined exports of soybeans, coal, and natural gas. A global magnet, international student tuitions contribute $45 billion to the U.S. economy. Colleges and universities are also responsible for massively increasing the average lifespan, improving socioeconomic mobility and access to opportunity, and training millions of highly skilled workers. Their innovation and dynamism play an essential part in promoting American prosperity and global leadership. U.S. colleges and universities remain the best in the world, but every assault on their academic freedom threatens this standing.

We call on the Trump administration to halt its destructive, ever-increasing attack on higher education. We encourage all boards of trustees to avoid concessions toward core institutional principles while encouraging their presidents to speak out in defense of their own schools.

Authors:

• Edward Ayers, University of Richmond
• Kimberly Benston, Haverford College
• Lee Bollinger, Columbia University, University of Michigan
• Phil Boroughs, SJ, College of the Holy Cross 
• Richard Brodhead, Duke University 
• Robert Brown, Boston University
• Carol T. Christ, University of California – Berkeley 
• Mary Sue Coleman, University of Michigan
• Ron Crutcher, Wheaton College (MA)
• Adam Falk, Williams College
• Jonathan Fanton, The New School
• Wayne A. I. Frederick, Howard University
• Stephen Friedman, Pace University
• Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania
• Andrew Hamilton, New York University
• Phil Hanlon, Dartmouth College
• Robert Head, Rockford University
• John Hennessy, Stanford
• Freeman Hrabowski, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• Nan Keohane, Duke University, Wellesley College
• Brit Kirwan, University System of Maryland
• Tony Marx, Amherst College
• Gail Mellow, LaGuardia Community College – City University of New York
• Anthony Monaco, Tufts University
• Richard Morrill, Centre College
• M. Duane Nellis, Ohio University, Texas Tech University, University of Idaho
• Lynn Pasquerella, Mount Holyoke College
• Laurie Patton, Middlebury College
• Steven Poskanzer, Carleton College
• Gregory Prince, Hampshire College
• Stuart Rabinowitz, Hofstra University
• L. Song Richardson, Colorado College
• Mark Schlissel, University of Michigan
• Jake Schrum, Southwestern University, Texas Wesleyan University
• Allen L. Sessoms, Delaware State University, University System of DC, Queens College – City University of New York
• Donna Shalala, University of Miami, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hunter College of the City University of New York 
• Teresa Sullivan, University of Virginia
• Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman College
• Lara Tiedens, Scripps College
• Steve Trachtenberg, George Washington University
• Daniel H. Weiss, Haverford College, Lafayette College
• Julie Wollman, Widener University
• Meredith Woo, Sweet Briar College

Institutional affiliations provided for identification only.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Read more:

• Harvard’s defiance of Trump’s ‘authoritarian incursion’ supported by 60 past and present college and university presidents

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