For years, blockchain in financial services lived mostly in the world of experimentation—proofs of concept, pilot programs, and innovation labs that rarely touched day-to-day operations. That era is ending. Today, blockchain adoption is moving from experimentation to scale. Across payments, capital markets, and banking infrastructure, financial institutions are beginning to operate on new rails—powered by tokenized money, programmable assets, and always-on settlement models. For credit unions serving first responders, this shift presents not just a technology opportunity, but a strategic one. Blockchain Is Becoming Core Infrastructure The most important change isn’t the technology itself—it’s how it’s being used. Blockchain is no longer about testing what might work. It’s increasingly being deployed as infrastructure to solve long-standing problems in financial services, including slow settlement, trapped liquidity, manual reconciliation, and limited operating hours. Cr...
Draft Horses Budweiser 101 Perhaps best known for its Super Bowl Clydesdale ads, Budweiser is among the world’s most popular beer brands. It was among the first beers to achieve national distribution in the late 19th century, thanks to its revolutionary refrigeration and pasteurization techniques, setting the stage for the modern US beer industry. Founded in the 1850s as the “Bavarian Brewery,” the company was acquired in 1860 by Eberhard Anheuser. He sold half of it to his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch , in 1869, forming the partnership that would become Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri. In the 1870s, Carl Conrad , a St. Louis distributor, traveled through a Bohemian town called “Budweis” in German and drank a pale lager. Upon returning home, he worked with Anheuser-Busch to brew its own light lager, marketing it under the ...