Trends & Signals
Explore the latest insights, thought leadership, and research from FCAT®
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...
AI: The Next Generation
March 8, 2023
We’re in a new era of AI. “It feels like we’re going from spring to summer,” said Jack Clark, a co-chair of Stanford University’s annual A.I. Index Report. “In spring, you have these vague suggestions of progress, and little green shoots everywhere....
Quantum State Preparation of Normal Distributions using Matrix Product States
March 6, 2023
In this POC, we designed a new way of generating quantum states that encode normal probability distributions, and provided the first study in quantum hardware for scalable distribution loading.
Eight Trends and Technologies Influencing Our Future
March 1, 2023
2022 was marked by increasing domestic and global tensions. This, alongside rising inflation, led to an unprecedented anxiety about our future.