Trends & Signals
Explore the latest insights, thought leadership, and research from FCAT®
Tech and Art Have Never Been Closer: A Review of SXSW by FCAT Design
May 5, 2023
A small team from FCAT Design (Kseniya Galper, Susan Fabry, and Will Reed) travelled to Austin, TX for the 2023 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in March. SXSW bills itself as “the premier destination for dreamers, innovators, storytellers, and...
What’s New & What’s Lasting: Tidings from SXSW 2023
April 21, 2023
Everything that’s happened these past few months has caused legitimate questioning of how tech is tangibly making people’s lives better. Maybe it is here where reflecting on the venue city of Austin could be fruitful – a city that has risen to...
Can AI Speed Up Blockchain Development?
April 20, 2023
This article was written in collaboration with Erman Akdogan of Fidelity Enterprise Cybersecurity and Chris McGahon of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology. All figures were generated in February using ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 model).
Finding Community Online in an Age of Individualism
April 18, 2023
Over the past 60 years Americans’ social, political, and economic lives have been dominated by a strong emphasis on individualism. But there are signs this dynamic may be changing. Social activism and labor organizing are on the rise, fueled by...
What’s Next for Blockchains?
April 11, 2023
Despite a rocky 2022 for the digital assets industry, blockchains remain a foundational technology poised to transform business operations and commerce. And while the big picture of how chains will communicate and interoperate with legacy...
MEV and Its Impact on the Future of DeFi
April 6, 2023
Although the blockchain architecture is decentralised, block content creation is a centralised process performed by miners. Therefore, miners have complete control over transaction ordering and inclusion, leading to the Miner (or Maximal)...
Rethinking Time and How We Invest It
April 3, 2023
The pandemic. Inflation. Rising Interest rates. Over the past three years we’ve experienced a series of shocks that have altered how we perceive and value time. How we save, spend, manage, and invest our time are all now top of mind concerns. This...
An Overview of Ethereum Staking
March 28, 2023
Staking is the process of supporting transaction verifications and new block creation for the Ethereum network. Validators, otherwise known as ‘stakers’ play a key role in performing key staking duties: storing data, processing transactions...
A Family of One: The Ascendance of Solo Households
March 27, 2023
Families have been the basic unit of social and economic life across cultures, geographies, and nationalities for thousands of years. That started to change in the middle of the 20th century, when a growing number of people started living alone for...
The Path to Blockchain-Based Financial Markets
March 16, 2023
Fintech’s Third Wave—the use of tokenization and smart contracts to rebuild the infrastructure, processes, and business models underlying fiat money and traditional assets—is well underway. The transition to this blockchain-based infrastructure for...