In January 2023, Bitcoin developer Casey Rodamor combined two previous upgrades to Bitcoin Core’s protocol to launch Ordinals and Inscriptions. The project jumpstarted Bitcoin and Layer 2 development as projects previously deemed impossible on Bitcoin were reconsidered with newfound enthusiasm. This movement has been dubbed the “Bitcoin Renaissance”. This paper is the first in a three-part series providing an overview of what L2s are, how they function, and what sorts of applications they enable on Bitcoin.

FCAT’s lead blockchain researcher Vanessa Kargenian shares her insights on how stakeholders are driving regulatory innovation across the industry.

In this article, we closely examine Ethereum’s network resiliency through the lens of validators, the backbone of the network’s security. We assess some of the most critical validator metrics such as staker profitability, client diversity, and slashing events.

This research paper establishes a quantitative framework to test the relationship between blockchain network health metrics and digital asset prices. With a better understanding of the blockchain metrics that impact native token prices, investors might more appropriately focus their research and generate a differentiated investment thesis.

Jack might have the perfect job for a guy who loves to talk crypto. Sure, he’s one of the hosts of the FCAT Crypto Brief podcast, but that’s only for 30 minutes a week. The rest of the time? He’s still neck deep into crypto as a researcher with Avon Ventures, which invests in startups that are innovating in the crypto space.

We sat down with Mahesh Ramakrishnan, an early-stage venture investor, to discuss how crypto economies are recreating physical world infrastructure. Dubbed “DePIN,” Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks are an exciting application of public blockchains that start to answer the question: “Well, why crypto?”

Since Ethereum first launched in 2015 as the first peer-to-peer smart contract platform, numerous competitors with a similar vision have emerged. When comparing these blockchains, media outlets and investors typically focus on the price and market cap of a blockchain’s native token, while other indicators of success, such as usage, development, and decentralization are often overlooked. This paper explores blockchains through the latter lens and establishes a framework for assessing blockchain health.

Recently, FCAT collaborated with Olin College of Engineering’s Senior Capstone Program in Engineering(SCOPE) on a project aimed at debunking “get rich quick” cryptocurrency strategies that have proliferated online.

The introduction of ordinals has sparked debate across the Bitcoin community regarding proper use of block space. Some consider ordinals as "spam" to the blockchain, occupying unnecessary space. On the other hand, proponents view ordinals as a way to open up new use cases for Bitcoin and enhance network security through increased transaction fees. This piece provides a summary of ordinals and examines their broader implications on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Meet Ryan Stuebe, FCAT’s Director of Bitcoin Mining and co-host of the Crypto Brief. Ryan has spent his entire professional career at Fidelity, making diverse stops along the way as he grew into the go-to mining guy for the company.

FCAT India engineer Aurobindo Nayak –– who goes by Auro –– speaks about why Fidelity Center for Applied Technology provides him with meaning and opportunity.

Up to $5 trillion could move to tokenized money formats like CBDCs, stablecoins, and deposit tokens by 2030. At this scale, at stake is not just the type of money used to buy goods, but the structure and operations of the financial system itself.

Solidity development has been a rapidly growing topic within the world of blockchains, specifically Ethereum. There have been many different tools & frameworks that support smart contract development and testing. With many different choices, what is the best way for developers to traverse the ever-growing options? Here we explore modern frameworks and their benefits when building smart contracts.

To mitigate the risks of financial loss and fraud, smart contract developers must prioritize smart contract security best practices from the outset. While numerous tools are available in the space, promising to identify vulnerabilities and propose fixes, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It is crucial to select tools with broad coverage, easy integration, and generic applicability to reinforce security and reliability throughout the smart contract's development lifecycle.

Parth Gargava, DeFi engineering lead and host of the FCAT Crypto Brief, readily admits that he’s not an expert on crypto regulations. And he’s not going to lose sleep if one country or another says they want to put a bunch of rules around digital currencies. He’s too busy tweaking and tinkering, fussing with the digital engines that make crypto systems hum.

In 2022, investors pumped $2.6 billion into generative AI startups—70% more than the previous year. The November 2022 release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s powerful and much hyped new language model, further fanned interest. Like many, crypto enthusiasts have taken notice, turning to social media to share example after example of how ChatGPT might be applied to crypto and blockchain. Early use cases include coding trading bots and assisting with smart contracts.

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 technologies and other public chain networks is still forming, blockchain’s technology and ecosystem continue to rapidly evolve, finding applications across all industries and converging with AI and IoT to unleash new possibilities.

Within the current EVM ecosystem, miners(validators) control block content building, a centralised process that leads to the MEV problem. The MEV problem directly impacts customers, and it has serious attention from regulators. Meta desc. The future of the Ethereum ecosystem and Defi highly depends on the resolutions to the problem problem of centralization in MEV.

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 including confirming other validators’ actions, and appending new blocks full of transactions to the blockchain. In this article, we’ll explore the nuances behind staking.

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 our industry will likely follow a path of least resistance, with different products and processes charting their own paths.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a nascent but rapidly growing area in the crypto industry, and many protocols have seen steady usage despite a significant decline in token prices. Hacks from code vulnerabilities, scams, and centralized exchange malpractice have harmed the industry’s reputation, and looming regulation should not be overlooked. As DeFi matures, however, these challenges can be overcome through innovation to provide a more secure, user-friendly experience for the next wave of crypto users.

Jason Ward didn’t need to take on the booms, busts, structural complexities, regulatory uncertainty, and energy-consumption concerns of the blockchain and its attendant technologies.

Why even use a private blockchain, wouldn’t a database suffice? It’s a question that’s colored most enterprise technology inquiries surrounding blockchain infrastructure adoption since Bitcoin launched in 2009. And it’s even more timely now as both layer 2 scaling solutions that enhance privacy and speed, as well as newer interoperable chains are making public chains more appropriate for enterprise use.

Before its historic collapse, Terra became one of the highest valued crypto ecosystems with a strong community of developers. But with a relaunched chain and a damaged reputation, are these developers still committed? An analysis of GitHub code contributions indicates an ecosystem in decline.

Bitcoin’s revolutionary design offers a new approach for financial inclusion, distributed ownership, and enforced scarcity. As it has grown in value, however, new narratives surrounding bitcoin’s utility have also emerged. A rocky performance year-to-date and sensitivity to macroeconomic indicators suggest that bitcoin is still finding its footing.

Over the past year Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have emerged as a much hyped yet intriguing new way to organize communities online. Owned and run by their users, these digital-native collectives operate transparently via smart contracts on the blockchain. While still in an experimental phase, DAOs early use cases provide a glimpse of their potential.

I’d never heard of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – digital proof of ownership enabled by the blockchain – until 2021. Like many, I came to them through mass media, through the likes of Kevin Roose of the New York Times auctioning off his column as an NFT and the artist Beeple selling an NFT of his artwork for $69 million at Christie’s. What was this new phenomenon all about?

Crypto currency is drawing more attention than ever before. Amid this high interest, FCAT recently hosted its fourth annual Cryptoasset Portfolio Challenge in late 2021. The event provides an opportunity to create and manage a mock $1 million cryptoasset portfolio, educating associates on digital assets while also encouraging a healthy competition.

Blockchain-based video games promise to accelerate the adoption of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and greatly expand the digital asset ecosystem. By making in-game items NFTs that are embedded in the blockchain, players can take ownership of the digital assets they accumulate while gaming and then sell or trade them for real-world value. Such functionality could restructure the economics of the $175 billion gaming industry and turn legions of gamers into digital asset investors.

A new version of DAT, the Digital Asset Tracker, has been released, giving users the ability to connect to more exchanges than ever.

In the digital assets landscape, a few elements remain constant: new coins, new ERC20 tokens, and new smart contracts are all launched regularly, along with the attendant complexity required to manage the details. There is no perfect solution for the management problem yet and, depending on when you entered the crypto space, the process for monitoring and aggregating your crypto holdings can vary greatly.

Scalability has always been an issue for public ledgers, this is old news. It’s a problem that engineers have been trying to solve for a number of years now. The issue has become more of a pressing need in the last 12 months with an increase of activity on public ledgers, and this has been reflected in transaction fees, sometimes seeing over $40 USD for common contract interactions on Ethereum.

The two main approaches to solving this issue have been a) scaling at the base layer, using techniques like sharding and novel consensus protocols, and b) layer 2 scaling techniques. Both approaches have been successful in different ways. Read more.

Digital assets continue to display tremendous growth, as investment banks, private equity groups, financial advisors and commercial banks grow more comfortable considering crypto as a potential investment opportunity and eventually a more widely accepted medium of exchange.

I’m attempting to learn the Rust programming language, and for me, the only way to learn something is by trying to solve a problem. I’ve decided to try to implement my own digital signature library for educational purposes, and hopefully share a little knowledge along the way. Read more here.

Lightning is not a silver bullet, but it will significantly aid in the utility of Bitcoin and the expansion of its monetary regime.

Money invention is something that necessitates first principles. Much like our founding fathers -who found it more suitable to create a new system of government from scratch rather than monkey-patch the existing agreement called the Articles of Confederation - Bitcoiners find it more suitable to create money from scratch rather than mangle our minds and hands through the legacy infrastructure that stilts today’s existing financial system. Or even worst yet, somehow reengineer the dollar back to a hard money standard.
Read More

The composition of the block header is an intricate and highly consequential process. If Bitcoin is a living, breathing organism, then the block header is the heart of the entire machine. The “block” in the Bitcoin blockchain is what moves and settles millions of dollars of value every 10 minutes and in the block. The block header is what notarizes the funds in a block, votes on consensus decisions and ultimately directs and defines the movement and legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions.

The following is excerpted from an interview with Carmit Hazay and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam. The two are experts in the fields of lightweight scalable protocols for secure multiparty computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), as well as co-founders of Ligero. The moderator is FCAT’s Simon Brown, principal blockchain software engineer in the blockchain incubator.

As the world inches closer towards realizing the true importance of privacy, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in ways data is collected. In our pursuit of reimagining financial systems with cryptocurrencies and blockchain, an open forum for discussion of upcoming ideas and trends around Privacy and Crypto was hosted by Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT).

In this article, we describe Bitcoin transactions, restricted transactions called Covenants, and our own research into secure Bitcoin custody using a type of Covenant called Vaults.

FCAT launched its blockchain incubator in 2015. Since then it has been our mission to fully understand Bitcoin and blockchain technologies and their impact on money and the modern financial system.

For philanthropic institutions, the emergence of Bitcoin has presented a unique set of issues. Donors enjoy the efficiency and tax savings of being able to donate non-cash assets directly to organizations such as Fidelity Charitable^®, a public charity.