Using drones and cutting-edge mapping technology, Utah’s Colliers real estate technology support team can show clients everything from nearby transmission lines to up-to-date aerial views of rapidly developing areas like Eagle Mountain — all with a few clicks.

Ready, set, lease

Mapping the future of real estate

This is, in part, thanks to the Map App — a multi-layer mapping application that allows clients or brokers to display a traditional mapping application layered with any number of different filters. These filters include demographic information — average household income, household size, population density and more — as well as development information like current office, hotel or multifamily construction projects.

Business Development Marketing Manager Brett Scothern calls the system “the most robust interactive map, I believe, in the nation — if not the world.” It’s specific to Utah, partly because the state has open-source data.

“Whenever the state updates their information, it automatically updates on this end so we are getting the most up-to-date information,” says Ernie Cottle, Colliers GIS manager of Utah. Other proprietary data layers are maintained manually by Colliers’ in-house team.

About three years ago, a full revamp and redesign gave users more customization and a more robust system than its predecessor. Hundreds of filters exist from ever-changing data and demographics to illustrating where the nearest golf course is. Any map app or even a Google search could pull up golf courses near you, but this gives you more than just a point on a map, Cottle says.

“Google Maps can’t provide detailed demographic overlays,” he continues. “With a printed map, you get static data, but an interactive map lets you overlay demographics with zip codes, showing how they relate and helping users focus on details their clients need.”

It can happen pretty quickly. Cottle recalls one instance where he was pulled into a meeting with a client to display the Map App. The client inquired about proximity to transmission lines and substations, and though a layer with that information wasn’t available, Cottle was quickly able to add one in real time.

“That right there is what won us business that day — being able to accommodate and find this data and immediately add it in so that it was right there and readily available for them,” Cottle says.

Another type of visualization

Aerial 360 Journeys is a new program from Colliers Utah that involves 360-degree imagery taken with drones to give both clients and brokers a wide-angle, high-quality view of the world around a property.

The idea was originally Scothern’s. The tool is limited to Colliers Utah and is still in development, but Scothern believes it will be available to Colliers on a national level very soon.

Scothern came up with the idea while shooting monthly-progress drone photography of a development for a broker to give out-of-state buyers a better view of the area. Now, about a dozen brokers with drones go out and provide their 360-degree images.

“Aerial 360 Journeys is really starting to take off,” Cottle says. “In six months, we have gathered nearly 60 images all over Utah, from St. George to Salt Lake City and from Heber City to Grantsville.”

Scothern says that, from this point on, it’s about getting as much imagery as possible.

“I want to have hundreds and hundreds of points,” he continues. “I think it’s going to be key for brokers to show their clients what’s really happening in an area instead of depending on Google Maps, where sometimes, if it’s not a well-populated area, they don’t scan for five years.”

A lot of business is happening in rapidly developing areas like Eagle Mountain, Tooele and Heber, so knowing that information is up-to-date is important.

“Nobody else is doing this, so it really gives us a competitive advantage when we’re trying to win business,” Scothern says. “No other brokerage has the technology that we have.” It also presents an opportunity for the client to be more involved in the process.

Setting the national standard

Soon, clients and brokers may get an opportunity to use a similar system outside of Utah.

“This could be massive in the next couple of years,” Scothern says. “When the concept was presented to the director of technology, he was very excited and expressed the desire to see it utilized throughout Colliers on a national level.”

Colliers Utah Associate Tyler Broussard has so far been involved in one deal that closed with the assistance of this very new process, and he’s excited by the possibilities it offers.

“I’m excited to see where this goes and happy that the Salt Lake Valley is putting it out first,” Broussard says, noting that it’s no surprise Colliers and Utah are on the cutting edge. “It’s awesome and unbelievably exciting, but to be frank, this is what we try to do at Colliers. We’re trying to push the limits; we’re trying to stay on the edge.”

So, what’s in a name? What makes a name change successful, and how do companies go about a change without losing brand identity?

Impart meaning

Sometimes, all it takes is a minor tweak, such as when Utah-based bicycle brand Fezzari Bicycles dropped the “Fezz” to become Ari Bicycles in March.

Jordan Washburn, director of sales at Ari, says it wasn’t necessarily that the name Fezzari wasn’t working for the company. Rather, company leadership felt Ari was a better name to take the company into the future.

That decision is not one to be taken lightly. “It’s not because you get bored of your name or logo; it’s not a spur-of-the-moment or on-a-whim decision,” Washburn says. The rebrand had been discussed within the company for years.

Washburn believes the logical and phonetic connection between the two names helps preserve brand identity. “Yes, it is a name change, but when we talk to people, really it’s the same name,” he says. “It’s like Joshua to Josh or Nicholas to Nick; Jonathan to John. It’s the same name, just shortened.”

While Fezzari is a made-up name, Ari is a real word that means “to exist” or “to be.” Washburn says this fits the company’s vision and the value of bicycling to a life lived in the moment.

Make it searchable

Learning company Infini-D, which rebranded to Mission.io earlier this year, underwent a more drastic name change.

The company specializes in learning games for kids, which are called “missions.” While Infini-D’s branding was great with kids, co-founder Skyler Carr says it wasn’t passing the test for teacher referrals.

“When a teacher says, ‘Hey, have you heard of…’ when talking to a colleague, that’s really powerful. Infini-D fails the test there,” Carr says, saying that if that colleague went to search for the company with the traditional spelling of “Infinity,” nothing would come up.

”We created a barrier for ourselves right there,” Carr says.

Though Carr says he will always love the name Infini-D because it got the company going, a change was needed. For about a year, Carr thought of different names and would sit with each of them for 24 hours. None of them passed the 24-hour test until “Mission.”

“When you hear your employees say, ‘I work at Mission,’ that’s really cool. It passed the test,” Carr says.

Give it some breathing room

Airborne ECS rebranded to Intergalactic in 2021 after narrowing a broad list of potential names from a branding agency. Funny enough, “Intergalactic” wasn’t the team’s top choice.

“When they first presented it to us, they had some really wild ones … Intergalactic was more in the middle,” says founder and CEO Brian McCann. But similar to how Mission.io’s Carr sat with new company names for 24 hours, Intergalactic’s branding agency said to wait two weeks. After that time period, the name stuck.

“I couldn’t believe it,” McCann says. “When we came back, everyone on my team said Intergalactic was the one that stuck out — every single person.”

From there, McCann says it was clear that the branding they’d developed for Airborne ECS didn’t match the new company name. It was time to rethink everything.

“It was like, ‘Look, now we’ve defined the brand, we know what the guts look like, we know who we are,” McCann says.

This story appears in the June issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.

On July 18, 2023, Extra Space Storage and Life Storage announced a merger. The announcement brought the end of a hectic due diligence period for the companies’ legal teams.

“From start to finish, we were under contract in under 45 days,” says Extra Space Storage Chief Legal Officer Gwyn McNeal.

Due diligence in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is a timeline and process that changes with each deal and as the market fluctuates. Before a merger or acquisition can take place, companies must do their due diligence “to identify dealbreakers, assess risks, make informed decisions, negotiate effectively, ensure compliance, plan for integration, and set the stage for a successful and value-enhancing merger or acquisition,” Foley & Lardner’s Louis Lehot and Eric Chow wrote in a 2023 blog post.

Noting that these are only a few of the topics covered in a thorough due diligence investigation, Lehot and Chow broke due diligence down into six different categories: financial, accounting and tax; legal; operational; technical; customer and team.

This involves the acquiring company taking a deep dive into financial patterns and revenue, legal topics like intellectual property and pending litigation, operational processes like supply chains, technical aspects such as cybersecurity and software, customer relationships, and information about staff.

Burning the midnight oil

When a merger or acquisition process begins, it’s all hands on deck. For McNeal, that meant twice as much time spent working as not.

“It was an amazing opportunity. It was the most energized and fun [experience] I’ve had on a deal,” she says. “That being said, they were 16-hour days for a long time, sometimes more as we got even closer. … My outside counsel, I don’t think many of them slept for 48 hours in a row.”

Tom Taylor, a shareholder in the Dentons Durham Jones Pinegar Salt Lake City office and a member of the law firm’s M&A team, says he’s seen deals that need to be completed in 30 days.

One of the ways that gets done, in addition to long days and nights, is by increasing staffing. On one 30-day, $80 million deal in the fourth quarter of 2022, Taylor says the other side of the deal put as many as 20 lawyers on the deal. In this instance, the buyers had already completed some of the necessary due diligence in a prior year, which helped accelerate the timeline.

With Extra Space Storage and Life Storage, McNeal’s team consisted of four lawyers, eight paralegals and about 20 outside lawyers looking at the big picture down to 401(k) plans.

McNeal notes that, in some cases, these M&A deals do get easier with bigger companies. Both companies were public at the time, which meant a lot of information was already out in the public. With a history of audited financials and disclosure of liabilities, they didn’t have to “start from scratch.”

It was also a special case where a Public Storage hostile takeover bid for Life Storage was rejected earlier in the year, which had some impact on the process.

Market fluctuations

Some say the M&A market has changed over the course of the past year from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, which means more time for buyers’ due diligence.

“It definitely felt like ’21-’22 was just a frenetic market for sellers [and] companies raising capital. There was just a lot of money to go around, frankly,” says Blake Tengberg, senior counsel at Foley & Lardner’s Salt Lake City office.

But going into 2023, a lot of those deals that had gone through in 2021 and 2022 began to hit their 12- or 18-month period where “numbers weren’t looking as rosy as the sellers or investors were wanting or were anticipating,” Tengberg says, and valuations started to fall.

N. Todd Leishman, another shareholder at DDJP in Salt Lake City, says that in a seller’s market, quicker deals don’t always mean the buyer isn’t doing their due diligence — it’s just that “the sellers could call the cadence of the transaction more,” and buyers that weren’t moving at the pace sellers wanted would be left out of the deal.

“Sometimes they have to just prioritize what is really the most meaningful data set for them to get and then make a buy decision,” he says. “I don’t personally view that as sloppiness or laxity, I just view it as them needing to prioritize the amount of work they would like to do and the amount of time they have to do it.”

As a result of that changing market, 2023 was a “slow year for mergers and acquisitions,” Tengberg says, though he notes deals are starting to pick up.

“Utah deal volume dropped by almost half last year, so a snap-back in 2024 was expected — and we saw that, certainly, earlier in the year,” says Troy Keller, partner at Dorsey & Whitney. “The second quarter had a slower start, but the pipeline is there and is moving.”

Citing Dealogic, Bain & Company reported that 2023 had 27,000 deals announced in the M&A arena, but the total M&A market dropped 15 percent to $3.2 trillion, the lowest that figure has been since it was $2.8 trillion in 2013.

In the first quarter of 2024, global M&A volume jumped 30 percent to $755.1 billion, Reuters reported, again citing Dealogic. That was largely spurred by 14 deals worth more than $10 billion.

Tomorrow’s tech

Looking to the future, there’s some feeling that technology like AI could be on the way to change the due diligence process.

Dentons states on its website — in a post written by AI — that generative AI “holds enormous promise of enhancing workplaces,” but it’s still a question mark for those in the field.

“A lot of people are wondering how it’s going to change what we do, and none of us really know,” Taylor says.

AI was not used by Extra Space Storage in last summer’s big transaction, McNeal says. She thinks the technology may eventually take on some of the work done by outside lawyers, but “it’s probably too early to be helpful on the acquisition process itself,” though she thinks “it’ll come.”

Until then, 30-person teams and 16-hour workdays are part of the deal.

Aaron Starks

President & CEO | 47G
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Aaron Starks’ resume contains some impressive work: chief revenue officer and VP of World Trade Center Utah, VP of strategic initiatives at Fortem Technologies, and a four-year stint as the general manager of FranklinCovey Education in Asia, to name a few. But when you hear him talk about his newest role as president and CEO of 47G, you can feel his excitement.

Founded in 2022 and formerly known as the Utah Aerospace and Defense Association, 47G is a self-described “ecosystem comprised of over 100 members and 20 academic institutions” to serve the aerospace, defense and cyber industries in the Beehive State.

Starks helped spearhead a brand identity change in October after a nine-month brand strategy process for the still-young organization.

“The value in that was understanding and determining who our No. 1 audience is, and it is talent,” Starks says of the rebrand. “With the most dynamic economy in America, the lowest unemployment, and [as] the youngest state in the nation, we needed a brand that can resonate with talent.”

The 47G name is significant in a couple of ways, with the number 47 being a reference to when pioneer immigrants first arrived in Utah in 1847. It’s also an acknowledgment of the lengths of human achievement. In 1954, United States Air Force Flight Surgeon Col. John Paul Stapp endured the highest G-force ever—46.2 Gs—when he broke the land record speed at 632 miles per hour and stopped in less than two seconds.“We recognize our pioneer heritage in 1847, but we’re also saying we want to go 47 Gs, too,” Starks says. “[We want to go] where no man has gone before, taking the industry where it’s never been, and we want to push the limits of our potential.”

In a quest to push that potential, 2023 was a big year for 47G—one that included tapping former Congressman Chris Stewart as the organization’s chair.

“He’s got an incredible pulse on the ecosystem, so it was a no-brainer,” Starks says. “Chris has been a great asset … I’m amazed at what he’s accomplished in such a short amount of time.”

Another key accomplishment was facilitating a memorandum of understanding with the government of Ukraine to build a bridge of collaboration between Ukraine and Utah’s aerospace and defense businesses, which has already resulted in a couple of deals, Starks says.

But just as 2023 was important for 47G, Starks says the next four years are “critical.”

“We’re laying the foundation for an organization that will bless the lives of people for decades to come. The impact is rewarding,” he continues. “If we can do this right, we’re going to be able to help companies win contracts that will change the state’s economy, that will create more jobs, feed more families and create richer education opportunities at colleges and universities. Is there anything more important than that? I mean, I don’t think so.”

One of the rarest elements in the world is being recovered in Utah, and it’s one that some say is instrumental in meeting demand for green energy products like solar panels.

Tellurium is used in copying machines, to color ceramics and glass, and to help make durable rubber products, but its most promising use is in solar cells. Tellurium and cadmium combine to form a compound with “enhanced electrical conductivity,” so “a thin film can efficiently absorb sunlight and convert it to electricity,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

In 2022, Rio Tinto began the process of recovering tellurium at its Kennecott mine on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley, from which copper has been mined for over 120 years. In 2023, it was one of just two active refineries recovering the element in the United States. Most tellurium recovery worldwide takes place as a byproduct of copper mining, and there are no tellurium-specific mines.

China produced about two-thirds of the global output of tellurium in 2023, according to a USGS report from early this year. But the United States’ estimated net import reliance for tellurium, which estimates what percentage of the demand is met through imported materials, dropped sharply last year.

According to the report, the net import reliance for tellurium was 95 percent in 2019 and 2021 and 75 percent in 2020 and 2022 but dropped to 25 percent in 2023.

With so few locations involved in tellurium recovery, Rio Tinto estimated in April 2023 that Kennecott would become the sixth-largest producer of tellurium in the world — contributing roughly 20 tonnes of tellurium a year, around 3 percent of the global supply. Only 580 tonnes of tellurium were produced globally in 2021, the company stated. For comparison, 21 million tonnes of copper were produced in the same year, according to Statista.

Rio Tinto Chief Advisor of Research & Development Saskia Duyvesteyn says the plant is performing “within the ranges that we would anticipate” in regard to tellurium recovery. Rio Tinto had made a previous effort to extract tellurium in Utah, but Duyvesteyn explains that the company “really struggled with the operational aspects of it.”

“From a purely economic basis, it was a challenge,” Duyvesteyn says. Now, the company is turning a profit on extracting the brittle metalloid, but “it’s not a lot of money.”

Why invest the effort? It is about being a partner for the U.S., she claims.

And there’s definitely a need there, according to the USGS. Listed as a critical mineral by the U.S., “there is little reliable information about specific deposits and primary production sources,” a USGS report states.

Not much is known about tellurium’s effects on humans either, if there are any, according to USGS Research Geologist Robert Seal, due to its low abundance in Earth’s crust. “More research is needed,” Seal says, adding that he would not expect the recovery process to enhance toxicity.

The USGS report states that “the more significant human health risks associated with tellurium production are found with the broader aspects of mining porphyry copper and [volcanogenic massive sulfide ore] deposits.”

Mines come with environmental concerns, including potential groundwater pollution and negative effects on fish and wildlife. But a commitment to green energy requires mining, Seal says.

“The energy transition will require commodities derived from mining,” he explains. “It is the only path forward if society wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The mining industry continues to try and improve its environmental practices, Seal states, adding, “The public seems to have limited awareness of this commitment of the mining industry.”

Paul Saunders, a senior advisor and member of the board of directors at Energy Innovation Reform Project, referenced a report from the World Bank Group that stated in order to reach climate change goals of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius outlined in the Paris Agreement, worldwide production of graphite, lithium and cobalt would need to be increased by 450 percent by 2050, with serious increases in other minerals required as well.

“It’s the only way to build the systems that we need to produce that kind of energy,” Saunders says. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot of additional material. You need a lot of new mines everywhere around the world to produce all of that.”

At this existing mine — the second-largest producer of copper in the U.S., according to Statista — it’s a win-win.

“It may not be the highest from a revenue perspective, but from the perspective of critical minerals recovery and really being a partner in domestic production of critical minerals,” Duyvesteyn says. “How do you put a dollar amount on that?”

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin | Unsplash

One common decision businesses face is how to get software. The three classic options: buy, build or work with a third party. It’s a decision that can have serious financial and efficiency consequences.

Worldwide IT spending on enterprise software is expected to reach $856 billion in 2023, according to Statista, up from 297 billion in just a decade. It’s big business, and one purchase can have a big effect on a company’s operations.

Brite Nites is a Utah-based company that has been providing residential and commercial holiday lighting since 1993 and has expanded to cover more than 10 states.

In 2016, the company set out to create scheduling software to automate its operations across multiple states. Opting to work with an outside company to develop custom software became an ordeal.

Brite Nites VP of business operations Jaime Lyons originally started the process by drawing up a plan of everything the company wanted in software, from scheduling, HR and finance to truck maintenance. Quotes came in at about $500,000, and they eventually moved forward with an Italian company.

“They said, ‘Great!’ They promised us the world, and after two years, they barely could deliver some sort of scheduling platform,” Lyons says. “It was buggy. It barely worked. We tested it for years and years. They promised us the world and delivered something so subpar.”

That sent Lyons and her team back to the drawing board, cutting down all the extra frills and opting to create a scheduling software that just got the job done. Another $400,000 in, and the company they went with, Go Interactive, was able to get the job done. They still work with the company today.

“Six or seven years later, we’re fully functional. Everything’s beautiful, runs pretty well, and now it’s fun because we get to add whatever we want, add new features,” Lyons says.

Payments continue for continued fixes and updates. With about $1 million into the project, Brite Nites at least has its ideal scheduling software.

To build or to buy, that is the question

Brite Nites’ story of delays and cost overruns is not unique. Harvard Business Review found that the average IT project overrun was 27 percent, but more notable was that one in six projects studied saw a cost overrun of 200 percent and a schedule overrun of 70 percent.

Fears over the price tag, wasted years of inefficiency while testing other systems, and being forced to start over if the first product isn’t up to standard might be enough to steer most companies toward off-the-shelf software. That might be for the best in most cases.

Dr. Steve Elmore is the managing director of business development and advisory services for Fresh Consulting and owns the company’s customer relationship management and contract tools.

In most situations, he says, companies should buy software rather than build it themselves.

“You should build when there is no solution available in the marketplace or [if] customization of an existing platform would be worse than custom dev,” he says.

Lyons agrees, “For most businesses, stay with the kind of software you can buy and use it to its max potential. … Use what’s out there first because I bet it could work for 85-90 percent of companies.”

Developing the perfect fit

Some of the top considerations for every software build or buy are price, security and functionality.

There may be a temptation to go into software development with costs and savings at the forefront of the mind. Lyons says that for her company, price was a factor, “We’d never spent that much money before on software, so we decided to go with a company that promised more.”

Ryan Mackerell, chief strategy officer at Ultradent, a dental products company based in South Jordan with nearly 2,000 employees and worldwide operations, says price shouldn’t be the leading factor in a software decision.

“I think you actually start with functionality. You’re either buying or building some software to do a job for you,” Mackerell says.

Similar to Brite Nites’ decision to whittle down its desired software that had previously included too many features, simple is best.

“The single biggest mistake that I think people make is they go looking for a software solution that is some sort of a silver bullet or a fantastic solution to a problem that they have, and they think that the software, whether they build it or they commercially buy it, that it’s going to cure all that ails them, and that is very rarely the case,” Mackerell says. “My advice to people, and this is something I’ve had to learn over the years, is to really go in and understand the problem you’re trying to solve, what you’re trying to accomplish with the software. And spend the time doing the analysis.”

That analysis means doing considerable research and not taking the word of marketing materials or software salespeople, he says. A lack of market research may force software developers to turn away companies looking to collaborate. At least that’s the case for Dale Richards, owner of Utah-based software innovation firm AppCreative.

“There’s an entire decision that needs to be made upstream from ‘buy or build,’” Richards says. “Is this even a product that should exist on the market? Is there an unmet market need for this product?”

When a customer comes to his team looking to build an app, Richards says he’s always looking to see if the customer “has done due diligence” in assessing the desire for any product that they want to build and take to the market, especially if it’s something they’re looking to monetize.

There are times when building software makes the most sense despite generally being more expensive. Having specific functionality requirements is one reason you may opt to build or at least modify pre-built software.

“You get into the special use cases where the majority of companies don’t need that functionality,” Mackerell says. “The vendor doesn’t put it in there, but they do at least leave the door open wide enough that you can go in and modify their software … [and] create that functionality.”

Ultradent spends millions on software annually and has internal developers and engineers on staff to work with its software products, patch problems and help with any questions.

Commercial applications often have security patches issued regularly, Mackerell says. 

That’s important to small companies that might not have staff in-house to issue security patches or explain software to other staff members.

“The most important determining factor should always be security,” Elmore says. “Can you build a secure solution? Can you recover on your own if there is an incident? In most cases, the answer will be ‘no.’”

Photo by Andras Adam | Unsplash

With recent Writers Guild of America and United Auto Workers strikes, labor unions have been in the public eye more and more in recent months, but public perception of American labor unions has been changing for much longer.

Americans’ approval rate of unions hit 71 percent in 2022, the highest since 1965 and a massive improvement over the last decade and a half, according to a Gallup poll. In 2009, just 48 percent of Americans approved of unions, according to Gallup.

Furthermore, a poll conducted by GBAO and commissioned by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, showed an approval rate of 88 percent from people under 30 earlier this year.

But even with the growing news coverage of strikes and union activities, many people still don’t know what unions do, says Brandon Dew, district representative for Operating Engineers Local Union No. 3 in Utah.

“I think even with those statistics, I don’t think that people in general understand unions, and that is what we do and how we benefit things as a whole,” Dew says. “So I think there’s a messaging problem there for sure.”

What does a labor union do?

Unions advocate for higher pay, improved benefits and safer working conditions. Wage inequality is probably the top union motivator in the current labor market, but it’s working conditions that might be somewhat overlooked by the general public.

Dew says he’s heard from some people that unions had a time and place, but “that time has passed,” and workplaces are now safe, eliminating the necessity of unions.

“I guess I would argue that ‘Has the time passed?’ We now have child labor that has been brought back into states because we have populations that aren’t fulfilling,” he says. “So now we have states that are allowing younger people to go into meatpacking plants and other very dangerous jobs.”

In March, the Economic Policy Institute published a report stating that the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws was up 37 percent, and at least 10 states had introduced or passed laws altering child labor protections. 

Wage inequality is likely to be workers’ top current concern, says University of Utah Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies Matthew Basso.

“When they think about their own pocketbooks, they’re looking at the really massive wealth inequality in the United States, something that we know has been growing dramatically,” Basso says. “They see, obviously, headline folks like billionaires, … but they also just see a smaller portion of Americans doing really, really well, and they don’t feel like they’re being rewarded for their hard work.”

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reports that through March of 2023, the top 10 percent of households had 69 percent of the total household wealth in the U.S. The bottom 50 percent had just 2.4 percent of the wealth.

The legislative power of approval ratings

Unions are not universally praised. Gallup research found that 53 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents disapproved of unions in 2023. Favorability among Republicans actually surpassed 50 percent for the first time this century in 2022, at 56 percent, but that was immediately followed by a drop of nine percentage points in 2023.Opponents of unions often believe that unions hurt businesses. A study from the Economic Policy Institute found that when taking benefits into account, unions raise unionized workers’ wages and compensation by about 28 percent, which can be a significant shift for a company.

Those union opponents have in the past controlled public perception through anti-union campaigns and hampered union influence through legislation, Dew says. For example, Utah repealed its state prevailing wage law in 1981. At the time, Americans’ approval of unions was consistently between 50 and 60 percent, according to Gallup. 

A prevailing wage “is the basic hourly rate of wages and benefits paid to a number of similarly employed workers in a given geography,” as defined by the Center for American Progress. Federal acts require contractors and subcontractors to pay locally prevailing wages and provide benefits, and about half of the U.S. states and some cities have their own prevailing wage laws, according to the Center for American Progress.

A dozen years after the law was repealed, a 1993 report from the University of Utah Economics Department reported that the repeal “accelerated the decline in the union share of the state’s construction labor market, drove down average construction wages in the state, and decreased union apprenticeship training for construction.”

Today, Utah has one of the lowest rates of union participation in the country—3.9 percent in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Beyond Utah, despite union favorability on the rise, the unionization rate hit a record low of 10.1 percent in 2022, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year the BLS collected data. For union advocates, reversing that trend could be a long process.

“I don’t see that the major law change will actually happen anytime soon, even under the Biden administration, because I think the Trump administration changed a lot of legal staff, so many judges in the Supreme Court, everywhere. They were replaced by more conservative views,” says Eunice Sookyung Han, an economics professor at the University of Utah specializing in labor unions and educational policy. “So trying to reverse that trend is happening, but I’m not sure it’s going to be very successful.” 

It remains to be seen how increased media attention will change union approval rates or spur any change in participation. The strikes of 2023, like the Writers Guild strike, could have an impact, but Han doesn’t think it will be negative.

“I think it’s more positive toward general public opinion than negative, but again, pro-business will always perceive this as anti-business,” she says.

Dew is optimistic that viewpoint can be overcome, citing 40 percent growth in the Operating Engineers Local No. 3 since 2014.

“I would argue that that’s hard work by the union itself, going out and showing value to contractors because we as a union, the operating engineers, believe that it’s not an us vs. them mentality with the employer,” he says. “It’s us as a partnership with the employer.”

Dew, who worked as a heavy-duty repairman mechanic, says unions can help “find a qualified workforce and make sure that our employers have the best people that can be productive and earn that good wage and benefit.”

Utah’s 10-year percentage decrease in union membership between 2010 and 2020 was one of the largest in the country, according to 24/7 Wall St. Still, union membership increased from 3.5 to 3.9 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to BLS figures. Dew believes the trend can still be reversed.

“I have a very optimistic hope that unionization is going to grow within this country,” he says. “I believe we’re seeing it grow here in the state of Utah and our union.”

Photo courtesy of Rocky Mountain Power

Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) is building the power “grid of the future,” and it’s paying Utahns thousands of dollars to participate. The company’s Wattsmart Battery program, which launched in 2020, has about 3,000 customers participating by storing approved batteries on their residential or commercial properties.

Each participant earns between $1,920 and $18,000—paid upfront—to participate in the program for four years, as well as an annual bill credit of $15 per kilowatt.

All Wattsmart Battery program participants must install an onsite solar system to charge the battery. According to William Comeau, VP for customer experience and innovation at RMP, there are 60,000 Utah customers with onsite rooftop solar. 

The batteries serve as backup electricity for participants’ homes or businesses in case of an emergency and contribute to RMP’s goal of being 70 percent renewable by 2030.

“Having that [many] renewables on the system requires a different type of grid, and the Wattsmart Battery program is one of the options we’re working with,” Comeau says.

The batteries will store energy when there is excess, like in the middle of the day, and then utilize it when the sun goes down and less energy is available.

“At the end of the day, it helps us manage renewable energy and match it with when our customers need that energy,” Comeau says.

Currently, RMP’s primary goal is a “go-back” program to get batteries installed under already-installed solar systems.“The big value or big opportunity is for those that currently have solar on their rooftop to reach out, look into the program, and look at getting a battery so they’ll have backup power during outages, and then start helping with the grid of the future,” Comeau says. “Those that hear about it that have rooftop solar are like, ‘Oh my gosh, if only I’d known.’”

Comeau says RMP is partnering with solar installers, namely ES Solar, to get more new people enrolled. When ES Solar helps someone set up solar in their home or business, they will also help them decide on the right solar system and battery size.

Currently, two battery manufacturers are supported, Sonnen and SolarEdge. Batteries range from 4.8 kW to 30 kW, with incentives of $400 per kW. 

“It’s a great resource … that can help keep costs low for customers and help the transition to a sustainable future. That’s where we fully expect it to go,” Comeau says.

Photo by Daniele Colucci | Unsplash

Not everything you see in science fiction movies is fiction—the work of Utah’s OxEon Energy is a top example. OxEon is among the groups partnering with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to produce MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, a system designed to create oxygen on Mars.

A brochure from the company describes MOXIE as the real-life version of Mark Watney’s “Oxygenator” in “The Martian,” and it’s functioning on a NASA Mars rover right now.

MOXIE, also a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses solid oxide electrolysis to produce 10 grams of oxygen per hour with a purity of 99.96 percent, according to OxEon. The process uses a chemical reaction to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen.

Since the atmosphere of Mars is 96 percent carbon dioxide and only .13 percent oxygen, any trip to Mars would require vast tanks of liquid energy. For comparison, the air in Earth’s atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen, according to NASA.

OxEon says a tank of liquid oxygen is the biggest single thing astronauts would need to bring to Mars. “To support a human mission to Mars, we have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth, like computers, spacesuits, and habitats,” MOXIE Deputy Principal Investigator Jeff Hoffman said for the NASA Mars webpage. “But oxygen? If you can make it there, go for it—you’re way ahead of the game.”

Whenever astronauts are first sent to Mars, which could be sometime in the 2030s, oxygen from this technology could be used to breathe and oxidize the fuel for the return trip to Earth since most of what is burned when driving a car or launching a rocket is actually oxygen.

Currently, MOXIE is performing measurements on the purity of the carbon monoxide and oxygen created and then discarding it. The version that could power a rocket to Mars will be 200 times larger. OxEon Co-Founder and CEO Lyman Frost adds that the company finished a demonstration earlier this year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Martian Environmental Chamber detailing methane production for the return trip home from Mars. 

Technology for here on Earth

The thought of powering space exploration is compelling, but it’s not the only thing in the works for OxEon, based in North Salt Lake.

“We have three technologies. The solid oxide electrolysis is probably the most exciting one,” Frost says.

Among other real-life science fiction projects, OxEon is working on a system that could help turn seawater into fuel to power U.S. Navy ships.

In collaboration with researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of Pittsburgh and the Naval Research Laboratory, the system reliably converted carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide in 2020.

Also among OxEon’s offerings is a Fischer Tropsch reactor, which produces fuel from a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and technology developed to capture and reuse carbon dioxide produced by power plants.

All these complicated technologies and processes aren’t the easiest to understand, but the bottom line, Frost says, is that OxEon could be at the forefront of many of the world’s current energy solutions.

“We have the potential to solve a lot of the problems that are concerning people right now,” Frost says. “If you start with a biomass, … something like cow manure or wood waste or municipal solid waste, any of those have hydrogen and carbon in them, and you can take those and use that energy to produce something that will replace an equivalent amount of petroleum.”

One of the biggest current problems with renewable energy, Frost says, is that it’s not always on. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow in the right way. He mentions one winery in California that OxEon is working with. The company works off of a solar grid, but its batteries don’t store enough power from the sun to power them through the night. OxEon has a solution.

“During the day, we’ll electrolyze water into hydrogen. We’ll store that, and then at night, we’ll run it back through the same set of cells to generate the electricity they need at nighttime. We’re basically time shifting the energy from the solar farm from when it’s available to when it’s needed,” Frost says. “First, we use electricity to generate hydrogen; then, we use hydrogen to generate electricity.”

Let’s go big

Right now, turning around the investment on one of these products will take a long time without government subsidies, Frost says. Scale is one of the most significant needs to meet the climate crisis head-on.

“You’ve got to be at a larger scale. There’s got to be enough demand out there to justify the capital investment to drive down the costs,” Frost says, offering televisions as an example. “Remember the small flat-screen TVs, when they first came out, how expensive they were? Now you can buy a 50-inch thing that will cover half a wall for a few hundred dollars. It takes volume. It takes experience on how you drive down the costs.”

All of the technology coming out of North Salt Lake is from a team of about 40 people and a company founded by three longtime acquaintances that has yet to take any outside investment.  

Frost co-founded the company in 2017 with Dr. S. Elango Elangovan and Joseph Hartvigsen. They have all worked together on and off since 1993.

While he says they will likely need to raise capital for the company to take “the next step up,” everything has been self-financed so far.

Photo courtesy of Qnergy

While carbon dioxide has long been the focus of global greenhouse gas emissions campaigns, another key front in the critical fight against climate change is reducing methane emissions. Utah-based Qnergy could be at the center of that battle with its new abatement systems.

According to the International Energy Agency, methane is responsible for about 30 percent of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution. Some methane is produced naturally, but it’s also released in the production of oil and gas, landfills and agriculture, where it’s released from animals’ digestive processes. 

Those human-impacted actions are where Qnergy comes in. The company develops methane abatement systems for methane-producing processes across the globe that can help turn methane that would have been wasted back into electricity.

As part of natural gas production, pneumatic devices “release or bleed natural gas to the atmosphere,” the EPA states. Qnergy’s systems are designed to “capture” that methane as it is released, Qnergy VP of Business Development Kevin Pang says.

“Now you’ve got yourself a really simple, elegant solution because you don’t have to change the infrastructure,” Pang says. “You just drop in, connect it to the well pad, and you’re up and running.”

Photo courtesy of Qnergy

In 2021 alone, Qnergy claims that its methane abatement systems mitigated over 150,000 tons of methane emissions, and they’re in growth mode. Qnergy CEO Ory Zik says that over 1,500 units are already in use, and the company is aiming for another 10,000 in the “next few years.” He says that is equivalent to removing 3 million cars from the road. 

“Given the pressing need to address greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, significant solutions are required. Qnergy aims to be a major contributor to climate change mitigation, with methane being a crucial target as the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2,” Zik says, adding that the company has achieved an annual growth rate of 70 to 100 percent annually over the past five years. “We intend to continue this trajectory, and even accelerate it, to meet the ever-growing demand for our products. Qnergy is committed to scaling up to address this challenge head-on.”

Qnergy was founded by investors who bought a Stirling engine company called Infinia, originally based in Washington state with a facility in Ogden.

Stirling engines have pistons that are powered and moved by repeatedly heating and cooling air. Zik says Qnergy is the only Stirling generator manufacturer, which the company considers highly important for remote power generation.“Qnergy has successfully accomplished what many deemed impossible: developing a commercial power generator based on the Stirling engine,” Zik says. “Engineering professors often teach why such a feat is extremely challenging, if not impossible. However, we have already deployed over a thousand of these ‘impossible-to-build’ generators. Making the ‘impossible’ a reality is an incredibly gratifying achievement.”

The company initially focused on Stirling engines for defense, space and solar energy. Zik joined the company in 2017 as an advisor to the board before moving into the CEO chair. After that, the company shifted entirely to climate change solutions, specifically methane abatement. So far, it’s been a success.

“Qnergy exemplifies a company that can achieve financial success while simultaneously doing good for the environment. Our climate benefits are substantial,” Zik says. “For example, our last year deployments managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to the emissions produced by all the cars in Ogden. As we continue on our current growth trajectory, we anticipate achieving the same emissions reduction as all the cars in Utah by 2025.”

The future challenge of methane abatement is removing it from rising air; this is common with free-ranging cattle and natural wetlands processes. When concentrated, like in oil and gas operations or indoor cattle operations where the methane can be channeled, methane abatement is a little simpler.

But there’s no time like the present to start. There’s a lot of work to be done.

“It’ll take decades and lots of R&D to be able to make that work,” Pang says. “But it’s the 80-20 rule, right? So if we can, it’s the first 20 percent on the largest farms, then the next 80 percent. Let’s go after those, and then you can kind of break those into subsegments.”

From Brandon Sanderson to Orson Scott Card, the Beehive State has been the home of some of the top fantasy writers for a while now. But they’re not the only ones building up a blossoming fantasy writing and publishing scene in the state.

It isn’t a secret that Utahns love to read fantasy books and watch fantasy movies. In 2023, the Cultural Currents Institute analyzed Google Trends data for the previous year and found that people in Utah searched for Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Twilight more than any other state.

The love for fantasy reading has translated into writing, giving birth to a generation of readers-turned-writers. Jessica Day George, born in Idaho but now living and working as a children’s fantasy writer in Utah, decided in fifth grade that she was going to be an author.

“Because that’s when I found out that ‘author’ was a job that they paid you money for,” she says, drawing inspiration from “The Hero and the Crown” author Robin McKinley. “When I discovered that book in fifth grade, … I kind of realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this was a job. She gets to make up stories about redheaded princesses who go out and slay dragons, and some people pay her money to just daydream, write it down.’”

Jennifer Nielsen, a New York Times bestselling author based in northern Utah, says Utah has a legacy of reading.

“Books teach imagination; Books teach to just envision different worlds,” Nielsen says. “If you speak to fantasy writers in particular, it’s very likely that they grew up reading ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ reading Tolkien. In many cases of this rising generation, they’re reading authors who have been established here for 10, 15, 20 years and taking inspiration from them.”

We all need a community 

The connection between a love for reading and a career as a writer is an easy one to make, but what makes Utah readers love these stories more than the average person? Depends on who you ask. For some, one of the lead explanations is a religious one.

“Growing up, we’re taught about prophecies, and we’re taught about mystical visitations, and we’re taught about people being healed, celestial beings that appear to people and immortality and things like that,” says Day George, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “That’s what we grew up hearing, so there’s a big attraction for that type of story outside of the scriptures.”Day George doesn’t point to that as the only reason for Utah’s success in literary fantasy. After all, there are millions of members of the Church outside Utah, and millions of Utahns are not members.

Several authors say their connections with fellow Utah authors are a large reason the state keeps churning out writers. Day George says she’s part of an email chain with over 200 children’s book authors and illustrators from Utah that offers networking opportunities. Cameron Dayton, writer of the 2015 book “Etherwalker” and creative director for video games like Call of Duty World War II, mentions connecting with Sanderson and many others while at Brigham Young University.

It’s like the game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” Dayton says, referring to the game where people try and find the shortest path to connect an actor with Kevin Bacon based on common actors they’ve each worked with. The title of the game assumes you can connect any actor to Kevin Bacon within six connections.

“Everything in science fiction publishing is probably more like three to four degrees away. … It doesn’t take a lot of time on the phone to get to the source, and that’s what’s great,” Dayton says. “It’s geographically a large state, but the human connections are rich and very, very close at hand.”

A first-class economy paired with inspirational geography

Utah’s physical topography is one of the most tangible explanations for our literary development. “I think it would be very hard for any creative person to be in the mountains or exploring Moab or southern Utah and not feel inspired creatively,” Nielsen says. 

Utah’s economy also can’t be ignored. Ranked by the U.S. News & World Report as having the top economy of any state in the United States, the opportunity of Utah helps authors in a couple of ways. One is that it draws business to the state in terms of publishers, which can help grow connections with authors.

Adam Sidwell is an author and the founder of Future House Publishing, an independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy books located in Pleasant Grove. He is a native Californian but went to BYU and started his business in Utah.

“I moved to Utah because this is a fantastic place for entrepreneurship and to start a business,” he says. “I came here as I was writing my own stories and started to have relationships with distributors and stores and retail outlets here in Utah, so it made sense to move.”

There’s also the fact that fantasy readership is on the rise across the country, something Day George thinks is a result of Covid and for which Sidwell points to advancing technology that allows fantasy to be brought to the mainstream on the big screen. Whatever it is, adult fantasy book sales increased 45.3 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to an NPD BookScan report.

Ultimately, it’s not just one thing creating a perfect storm for the success of fantasy writing and publishing in Utah. “This is a lot to unpack here,” Day George says. “There’s no magical thing.”

Photo courtesy of Metrodora Institute

The most exciting medical frontier in the world right now is in the treatment of neuroimmune axis disorders—at least if you ask James Hemp, the chief scientific officer at Metrodora Institute.

Along with Fidji Simo and Laura Pace, Hemp co-founded Metrodora Institute, a new clinic in West Valley City focused on these disorders for which there is currently no cure.

Neuroimmune axis disorders are those that affect multiple body systems, such as the nervous, immune and gastrointestinal systems. According to a study published in the journal Gastroenterology, about 40 percent of over 70,000 survey respondents met the criteria for functional gastrointestinal disorders, products of “gut-brain interaction.”

Other neuroimmune axis disorders include long COVID, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Take irritable bowel syndrome, for example. It may not seem like a problem that has much to do with the nervous or immune system, but it’s very connected, Pace and Hemp say.

“The vast majority of the effort of the immune system is protecting us from things that come through our GI tract,” Hemp says. “Because of that, that’s where most of that communication occurs between your immune system and your nervous system and actually controls the function of how our gastrointestinal tract actually works.

With limited treatment options and no cures, it’s a field that Metrodora is looking to make significant progress in through advanced, multidisciplinary care.

Pace, who also serves as CEO of the company, feels that through research, they can make scientific advancements more quickly for neuroimmune axis disorders, which she says has been a neglected medical space.

Photo courtesy of Metrodora Institute

“Irritable bowel syndrome is one of those conditions where you actually have both the nervous system and the immune system impacted, but the name suggests that it’s just irritable and a little bit bothersome and not really impacting quality of life,” she says. “But the biology that we understand from basic sciences tells us this is a really significant condition, so it has a lot broader impacts than people think.”

Pace says that by the end of the year, Metrodora expects to have 160 staff members in West Valley City, a location picked in part for ease of access to the airport, cost savings compared to building on the coasts and local community partners in the area.

Since opening, Metrodora has received referrals from hospital systems across the country as well as the National Institutes of Health, Pace says, with “no shortage of patients” so far. 

Patients can self-refer unless they need a referral from a primary provider for insurance purposes. As of the end of May, they have one signed contract but are hoping to eventually take all insurance providers.

While that’s one problem Metrodora is working on, Hemp and Pace are excited about what they believe they can achieve in giving people with neuroimmune axis disorders their lives back.

“There has been incredible progress in the past couple of years, but we’re really decades behind other areas of research, and I think this is going to change dramatically,” Hemp says. “The next 10 years are literally going to be the decade of neuroimmune axis research, and it’s going to very likely lead to a significant amount of progress for understanding and also lead to a number of cures for these disorders.”

Photo courtesy of Metrodora Institute

Mindfulness is defined by the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surrounding environment through a gentle, nurturing lens.”

Smyth is the managing director of Mindfulness Utah, which offers mindfulness workshops, courses, retreats and more in-depth consulting work to embed mindfulness practice into companies’ cultures. She says more than anything, mindfulness is just about living in the moment, no matter how mundane that moment might seem.

“Have a snack, but pay attention. Choose not to let your mind think about anything except for what you’re eating,” Smyth says. “Actually see the color of it. Actually smell any scents. Actually notice when you’re chewing it, when you’re swallowing it. Let your mind be present.”

As mindfulness enters the workplace, proponents like the Niagara Institute say its practice can help improve focus and communication and reduce burnout.

In a 2020 study summarized in Harvard Business Review (HBR), researchers Lindsey Cameron and Andrew Hafenbrack found that, while practicing mindfulness, IT consultants and call center representatives in India and the United States were more “attentive and helpful to their coworkers and customers throughout the day.”

Smyth mentions two misconceptions about mindfulness: the idea that mindfulness means just doing things slowly and taking time to give yourself a breath. On the contrary, she says, you can do anything mindfully. Mindfulness is a skill, not just a breathing exercise.

“A lot of people think it’s just taking a breath, and yes, it can be that simple,” Smyth says. “But when we look at mindfulness as a skill, it’s really the ability to pay attention on purpose to what it is you’re doing with intention and without being reactionary.”

The way mindfulness developed in the United States often emphasizes breath, but Smyth instead suggests doing some sort of movement—such as a stretch or a quick walk—as the first step to being more mindful. She says when you’re in a heightened state of stress, focusing intensely on your breath can actually leave you feeling more agitated. 

In “Where Mindfulness Falls Short,” a 2021 article published in HBR, researchers wrote that a mindfulness exercise at the end of the day might be more effective than a mid-day mindfulness exercise that makes employees more aware of their work stresses.

Photo courtesy of Mindfulness Utah

Smyth says remaining focused and mindful at work can help employees feel more satisfied, but not everyone is on board with the trajectory of mindfulness in the workplace. After all, remaining on task all day and being more focused on work might just seem like a benefit to employers who want to get more from their workforce.

Ronald Purser, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, is the author of “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality” and an ordained teacher in the Korean Buddhist Taego Order. He has been an outspoken critic of how mindfulness has been employed in the workplace.

Back in 2013, he co-wrote a blog for HuffPost with David Loy stating, “Corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments.”

In a 2019 CBC Radio interview, Purser said mindfulness needs to be reclaimed “from becoming a hostage of capitalist instrumentalist applications,” saying that it’s turned into a “technique and not a way of life.”

“Mindfulness has been seen as a means to an end,” he said in the interview. “When you separate that out, you’ve made a Faustian bargain. Yes, you can turn it into a nice therapeutic technique that can develop a sense of quiet and calm. But then it could be used for nefarious purposes.”

According to Cameron and Hafenbrack, mindfulness at work was effective in certain situations, such as for people whose jobs require a lot of interaction with other people. 

For employees tasked with faking a smile as part of their day—termed “surface acting”—mindfulness can be ineffective or even counter-productive, making them more aware of their negative feelings.

“This, in turn, reduces job satisfaction and performance, as the mental resources needed for work get sapped by a newfound awareness of their own inauthenticity and negative emotions,” the researchers wrote in “Where Mindfulness Falls Short.”

Smyth says while some might think mindfulness sounds like manipulation or resource extraction, employees do get something out of it.

“We might walk down the street or … the hallway and miss really simple things that could actually bring a lot of joy to our lives, and at the end of the day, isn’t that life? Don’t we all want to be fulfilled and happy and have these joyful moments?” she asks. “I think that’s kind of the employee’s ‘why,’ the incentive. Maybe there is a little bit more in every moment of your day that you could savor.”

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization structure popular in the blockchain space that doesn’t have a central governing body. Instead, members of the DAO manage the organization through shared voting and smart contracts.

HB 357, signed into law in March, recognizes DAOs as legal entities. Without recognition as legal entities by the government, DAOs were not able to enter legal contracts and didn’t offer limited liability protections for DAO contributors.

DAOs are a relatively new type of entity that doesn’t fit perfectly into current business regulations. They can consist of thousands of members and can form for a variety of reasons, ranging from investments to the Utah-based group that tried to raise billions to buy the Denver Broncos last year.Limited liability protection is the top feature of the bill, says Robert Lamb, a lawyer and member of the state’s Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force. From the moment Lamb joined the task force, he had this bill in mind.

“I showed up for the first meeting with the DAO act in my pocket,” Lamb says.

Utah isn’t the first state to create a law regarding DAOs. Wyoming introduced legislation in 2021, putting DAOs under its LLC rules in what Lamb calls an “LLC wrapper.”

While Lamb says he doesn’t think LLC legislation applies perfectly to DAOs, Wyoming recognizing DAOs drew them to the state.

“To try to marry those two things, I didn’t think was a perfect fit, but I also saw that Wyoming was effective in that a lot of DAOs rushed to Wyoming to quote-unquote ‘incorporate’ because they wanted that level of legal personality and protection,” Lamb says. “I thought it was brilliant what Wyoming had done, but I thought, well, we should do something different—more comprehensive—if we have the opportunity.”

The Utah DAO Act requires a registered agent of each DAO to be maintained with the state. At least one organizer of a DAO must be an individual who files with the state.

According to the bill, members of the DAO will not be held accountable for “obligations incurred by the decentralized autonomous organization” or for “the wrongful act or omission of any other member.”

Even with the new act, there’s nothing requiring a DAO operating in Utah to register. Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force Member David Wyly says the bill just makes registering an option, allowing DAOs to take advantage of certain legal benefits, such as entering into legally binding contracts.

“It adds more legitimacy,” he explains. “And when you start adding more legitimacy and more of a framework for these DAOs to operate in, I think it shines a light on the good actors, and the bad actors will typically crawl away.”HB 357 went through the legislative processes earlier this year but won’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2024. The bill’s sponsor was Rep. Jordan Teuscher (R-Salt Lake).

Despite a long-standing interest in blockchain technology and having bought bitcoin for the first time in 2018, Teuscher is a self-described novice in crypto. Still, he sees big things in Utah’s Web3 future.

Among the other blockchain and crypto legislation, the state has worked on SB 160, which introduces a “sheriff node program.” The program could potentially reverse fraudulent blockchain transactions—something that doesn’t fit into the current world of cryptocurrency.

“Again, very antithetical to the immutable nature of blockchain, but something consumers are asking for,” Teuscher says.

SB 160, signed by Gov. Spencer Cox in March, authorizes the Utah Attorney General’s Office to operate a blockchain node to, based on court orders or arbitrations, reverse blockchain transactions from a reversible blockchain that agrees to be subject to Utah court jurisdiction. 

Whatever is next, it appears future possibilities are wide open. If Teuscher and members of the Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force have their way, the future is in Utah.

“There’s just so much benefit, but it’s important as part of that benefit to be first,” Teuscher says. “If you’re last to the party here, the parade’s gone, right? They’ve established their roots somewhere else, and so I think Utah is uniquely qualified to be able to step into this space and try to make a difference.”

Laukat, who lives in Sandy, is one of few board game designers that have turned their passion into a successful business and full-time career. About 11 years ago, while working on games out of his basement with his wife Malorie, the Laukats launched their first Kickstarter crowdfunding effort to try and turn Ryan’s work into a game for the masses to enjoy. That Kickstarter, for a game called Empires of the Void, raised about $36,000 from 651 backers.

At the time, it was one of the top 10 highest-funded games on Kickstarter, Laukat says. Laukat’s world—and the world of board game funding—has changed wildly since then. 

Fast forward to April 2022, and the Laukats’ Red Raven Games launched its newest game, Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies, with a $40,000 crowdfunding goal set on Gamefound. The goal was reached in less than three minutes. As of writing, over 14,000 backers have pledged over $2 million combined to see the project through.

Building that devoted audience of fans didn’t happen overnight. It took about five years after Empires of the Void before Laukat was able to turn board games into a full-time career. In the 11 years since Empires of the Void, Red Raven has completed 16 more successful crowdfunding campaigns.

In 2015, after a few other releases like City of Iron and Eight-Minute Empire, a game called Above and Below raised $142,148 from 2,553 backers, a big step up for Red Raven and one of the company’s most successful games to this day. In 2016, Near and Far raised over $520,000 from 7,245 backers, but Red Raven truly started to explode with the original Sleeping Gods game, which saw the company hit $1 million in pledges for the first time. 

Consistently putting out a good product has been a big part of cultivating a fanbase and propelling Red Raven to success, Laukat says. 

“You hear stories about game projects that maybe don’t deliver, or they deliver but the game is really disappointing to a lot of people,” he says. “But we’ve tried to be as consistent as possible and on time whenever possible, and I think the audience has built up over time. So any time we announce a new project, we can talk to the people that have backed previous projects and have stuck around and like our games.”

Not every launch is successful, especially when it has thousands of eyes on it, waiting with high expectations for the game’s release. Rift Knights, for example, launched its Kickstarter on Nov. 9, 2020. Four days later, the project was canceled. Months of work had already gone into the game and the funding goal had already been met, but it wasn’t worth continuing if fans weren’t into it, Laukat says.

“We actually could have printed the game with the funding that we got, but it seemed like the backers were not as happy with what the product was going to be,” he says. “It just felt like we weren’t going to deliver what our fans were expecting or wanted from our company.”

No money is exchanged before the game is released, so backers aren’t out money when a project is canceled. Rift Knights is the only project Red Raven has canceled.

“I feel like it’s OK to cancel a campaign because one thing I love about Kickstarter is it’s just a great place to put your ideas out there and see how the public reacts,” Laukat says. “It puts us through kind of a trial-by-fire, and I believe that a lot of our games have become better because they were put through that trial.”Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies is wrapping up that trial now after about three years of work. It’s gone through rigorous testing from the Laukats, Red Raven staff, and fans. In September, over 100 people came out to test the game at an event in Utah. Those that backed the project will receive the game in August, with retail release scheduled for October. Project backers will receive a collector’s edition of the game and additional items depending on their pledge amount.

For Laukat and the rest of Red Raven games, it’s on to the next game as soon as Distant Skies goes to the printer. Laukat has a couple of ideas in mind for what’s next, but he hasn’t decided which one he’ll jump into first. It probably won’t be as big of a project as this one, he says, as Distant Skies is an “open-world” game that can take 15 to 20 hours to play. It can be packed up and re-started as a player’s time allows, much like a book, so it doesn’t have to be completed in one sitting.

In Distant Skies, storylines branch off one another to create a “thrilling tale that hinges on your choices,” the crowdfunding page states. Red Raven employee Brenna Asplund describes it as “an open-world RPG (role-playing game) in a box. Like Skyrim but physical.” Not all of Red Raven’s games are that way, with some that take an hour or less, but people who enjoy long, storybook-style board game adventures are a key part of the company’s fanbase.

Asplund has worked for Red Raven since 2016 as a proofreader, writer, and more. When she began with the company, she wasn’t as into board games as she is now.

“I played games like [Settlers of] Catan and Risk, and I really enjoyed board games, but I didn’t know as much about the big hobby space that was out there with these new, cool, exciting games,” she says. Now, she owns hundreds of games and has fully engrossed herself in the hobby.

The board games market is expected to grow by just over $3 billion worldwide by 2026, according to a TechNavio report. With that growth, more people are starting to make the jump to games like Sleeping Gods.

“The more [people that] have played games like Settlers of Catan, another game like it doesn’t seem so intimidating. That barrier goes down,” Laukat says. “It just seems like a bigger acceptance of the hobby has helped it spread.”

As that part of the hobby grows, it remains to be seen what it means for Red Raven—but they’re likely to keep things going as they currently are. Red Raven has four employees and two freelancers they work with. Laukat doesn’t see the company growing into a huge board game conglomerate anytime soon.

“The truth is, I’ve learned that I really want it to be just a small company where we don’t have that huge pressure to release tons of titles to support a huge staff. We just get to work on the stuff we’re most passionate about,” Laukat says. “I’m more happy when we can just keep it small … We can be more expressive about the games we want to make.” 

Students in Associate Professor Alf Seegert’s video game storytelling classes at the University of Utah are learning about video games as an art medium, something that would have seemed unfathomable at the turn of the century. Long derided as a waste of time, a lazy hobby, or just for kids, video games are starting to shake some negative stereotypes. Plenty still exist, but the perception of video games is moving in a positive direction, experts say.

“I think we’ve really seen a shift since the turn of the millennium where things started to shift in terms of public discourse,” Seegert says. 

We’ve reached a point in popular culture where video games are seen as art, he continues. If there was a Mount Rushmore of the greatest works of all time, from films to poetry and books, one of the spots might just be reserved for a video game.

“Now, I think more people playing mainstream games have had emotional experiences or attachments to them the way that they would with great films or books or art of another media, and that has changed the perception quite a bit,” says Clark Stacey, co-founder and CEO of Utah-based game company WildWorks. “There’s certainly a perception out there that there are games that are simply… blowing things up and killing things, but I think there’s a growing recognition that games as an art form can be as affecting or transformative as other art forms.”

And it’s not just because of improvements in graphics, either. Video game graphics constantly soar to new heights, but Seegert’s class doesn’t just focus on next-gen games with million-dollar budgets and long storylines. Video game storytelling can be very simple.

One of the games that Seegert’s students focus on in class is “Thomas Was Alone,” a game first released online in 2010. The game’s characters consist exclusively of 2D rectangles, but players still become attached to the characters and get engrossed in the story.

“Thomas Was Alone” is also a shining example of the wide range of games people can enjoy in today’s era of gaming. New games are released daily, with new game genres bringing in new players. Indie gaming studios are competing with billion-dollar gaming studios, and some will find great success.

“Around 2010, you started to see the boom of indie games. Independently-made games often had really rudimentary graphics, but they had vision,” Seegert says. “You’ll have teams of maybe two people, maybe only one person working on a game that ends up doing something unusual, and it really democratized what was going on with video games in a lot of respects.”

Seegert grew up playing arcade games in the 70s and 80s when there weren’t many different options for players. Today, the classification for what is considered a video game has been stretched immensely, and the number of video games is exponentially higher. From intense first-person shooters to Candy Crush on your smartphone, video games are everywhere.

About two-thirds of Americans—roughly 215.5 million people—regularly play video games, according to an Entertainment Software Association (ESA) report. Of video game players, 70 percent play on smartphones (these are largely puzzle and arcade games). And of the 215.5 million people playing video games in America, 48 percent identify as female, according to the ESA. Seventy-six percent of players are over 18 years old.

“Games are so varied,” says Corrinne Lewis, an associate professor in the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts & Engineering department. “There are so many different types of games. It’s not just a first-person shooter or a role-playing game, so they’re tapping into a whole different level of potential interest in lots of other people, not just men.”

Many people who simply enjoy puzzle games on their mobile devices may not consider themselves “gamers,” but they contribute to a growing video game industry. A new generation of parents that grew up playing video games contributes to improving public opinion, Seegert says.

“You do have parents who grew up with games, so they introduced their children to games,” he says. “It’s so different. A child growing up in the 1970s would never be listening to their parents’ music, would never be playing whatever they were playing as children … now you have kids with Led Zeppelin t-shirts on, and that was at its peak 50 years ago. They’re playing things that their parents played in the 80s or whatnot, so I think that will be a big part of what’s going on there to explain the shift.”

Parents that grew up playing video games may also have a more favorable opinion of them. A survey of over 1,000 parents from internet service provider Frontier found that nearly 63 percent of parents of video-game-playing children thought the games positively influenced their children. That number was lower for children between the ages of 14-17 and higher for kids ages five to nine.

Mature video games still do cause some concern. A 2017 study from the Pew Research Center found that six in 10 adults thought violence in video games contributed to gun violence in America, though that varied by age. Eighty-two percent of adults 65 and older thought video game violence contributed a great deal or a fair amount, compared to 42 percent of adults aged 18 to 29.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has linked violent video games with aggressive behavior but says there is “insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” The APA distinguishes that all violence is a form of aggression, but not all aggression is violence.

Violent video games still carry a certain stigma with them, but simply playing video games typically isn’t seen as the lazy, antisocial activity it used to be. “We have seen how prosocial games have been during the pandemic,” Lewis says, comparing the positives of playing video games frequently to people who watch lots of television.

According to Statista, the average person aged 55 or older watches over three hours of TV daily. People 75 and older watch nearly five hours per day.

“If somebody said that I was playing a video game for 50 hours a week, they’d think I was addicted,” she says. “But we don’t think about that with TV because it’s just on in the background. Well, games are so much more interactive. They do a lot for our brains.”

With certain games, screen time isn’t considered a negative, even for kids. And with more games out there, parents have more choices today over what kinds of games their kids can play. 

Stacey has been involved in that world for a long time, and he’s seen parents’ opinions about their children playing games change as the games do. “Parents are seeing educational games or experiences that kind of blur the line,” he says. “Parents have seen games play more of a role in their kids’ education, and there are educational apps out there that are gamified that have actually gotten much, much better than they were five, 10 years ago.”

Stacey says parents likely don’t want their kids playing violent video games the same way they wouldn’t want them watching violent movies. He compares early education games to “chocolate-covered broccoli,” where games are essentially a curriculum with a couple of game rewards or characters loosely tied in. And just like the options for adult video games are widening, children’s video games are ever-improving as well, giving parents more choices.

In February of 2022, Homie laid off 119 employees in the face of changing real estate and economic conditions. The cuts amounted to 28 percent of the company’s workforce. 

Homie founder and CEO Johnny Hanna quickly took to LinkedIn to offer reference calls for every employee laid off. They were good employees, he says; the company just didn’t have the work it had hoped to. “When you’re in growth mode, you hire with plans to have more and more work,” he says. “When that work doesn’t come, you’ve over-hired, and you have to pull back.”

Hanna says the layoffs were part of a natural business cycle. For the past few years, the business has been focused on increasing revenue. Now, there’s a focus on profitability. “I think that’s the pullback in growth at all costs. We were rewarded. Everyone else has been rewarded as well, with increasing revenue,” he says. “In business, you focus on revenue growth, and then profitability becomes the new cool thing, and then you get to profitability, and then profitability is rewarded, and then growth is rewarded again. It’s just a cycle.”

Homie’s real estate system doesn’t use a commission for its local agents but rather a flat listing fee to sell homes. It’s a significant change from the traditional real estate industry. As a result, the company reported 150 percent revenue growth in 2019, leading to a $23 million capital raise announced in January 2020 that would help the company expand its Utah and Arizona operations into Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho. It was one of a growing number of emerging technology companies that raised large funding rounds in recent years.

“There’s never been more dry powder than there is right now. There has never been more money to be invested in companies than there is right now, and there hasn’t been over the last several years. It’s just been amazing,” Hanna says. “People continue to get round after round in high valuations without needing to focus on profitability. I think that’s where we, and everybody else, had to cut back. Because we were all focused on growth and expansion, we were being rewarded for it.”

It’s true. According to Crunchbase, global venture investment shattered records in 2021, with $643 billion invested and 92 percent year-over-year growth. That has pulled back in 2022. Crunchbase reported that in the second quarter of this year, funding reached $120 billion, the lowest quarter since the start of 2021. Hanna says investors “seem to be a little more hesitant in this environment.”

The past two years have also seen low unemployment rates for jobs in Utah and the US. The US unemployment rate was 3.6 percent in June 2022 and just 2 percent in Utah, according to the Department of Workforce Services. We were the second-lowest state in the nation—behind only Nebraska—and Salt Lake Chamber president and CEO Derek Miller doesn’t expect those rates to rise in the coming months. 

Homie was among the companies hiring “red-hot” until October 2021, Hanna says. At that point, company leaders re-evaluated the real estate market and “saw things were starting to cool off a little bit.” After years that saw homes gobbled up as fast as they could be listed, rising interest rates have led to a spike in housing inventory. In July, the Utah Association of Realtors reported that median home prices rose in the month before, but homes were staying on the market for 17 percent longer, and new listings rose 12 percent. Still, the group notes that it’s still a seller’s market. The real estate market is far from the only industry in a state of flux, and Homie is far from the only tech company to cut jobs this year. According to an analysis by Crunchbase, over 32,000 workers in the tech sector were laid off between January and July of 2022. Coinbase, Robinhood, and Netflix are among the companies to slash their employee totals so far. Through the midway point of 2022, tech layoffs haven’t drastically affected overall employment rates. Many companies continue to search for large numbers of workers.

That’s true in Utah, too—companies here have continued to hire in large numbers. For example, expense management software company Divvy is hiring for over 60 positions, mainly in Utah. 

“The market for talent in Utah is fantastic, and we’re excited to be hiring from such an amazing local pool of talent to work in our Salt Lake City location,” Michael DeAngelo, Bill.com chief people officer, said in a statement.

Still, Americans and business leaders are on high alert. May’s consumer confidence in Utah hit its lowest level since data collection began in October 2020, according to the Salt Lake Chamber, and economic sentiment amongst the Utah business community dropped for the third straight quarter in Q4 of 2021, according to the Chamber’s CEOutlook survey.

“I feel like we’re just kind of at an in-between state right now where it’s not a recession yet. It looks like one, but no one’s really sure, so there’s a little tension,” Hanna says.

Those concerns coincide with the US economy slipping in recent quarters—the country technically entered a recession in July. 

Defined by many people as two straight quarters of decline in the economy, the White House pushes back on that definition, saying, “Both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data, including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”

Miller has an optimistic tone when looking at the state of the current economy. A recession doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds as long as employment stays strong, he says.

A pair of small quarterly declines, if not coupled with significant unemployment, doesn’t have to be felt at such a large scale by the average household as it was 13 years ago. Even if growth stalls, the overall economy could remain strong as long as people are still in jobs in Utah. For comparison, unemployment peaked at 10 percent in late 2009 during the Great Recession, up from five percent at the onset of 2008. “It’s possible that we could go into a recession but still maintain a low unemployment rate, which would be the best case scenario if we were to go into a recession,” Miller says. “We’re a consumer-driven economy, so it really is jobs that matter most. Jobs matter to the individual, jobs matter to the family and the household, and jobs matter to our economy. Because as long as we can keep people in jobs in Utah, they’re going to be getting a paycheck, and they’re going to be spending money. At the end of the day, it’s people spending money that makes our economy go.”

Ben Blau, a finance professor at Utah State University, says things could start to change as conditions continue to evolve, including interest rate increases. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75 percent in July, the second straight month it had done so. “We’ve never really had this situation where unemployment numbers have been so strong, but we’ve actually been in a recession,” Blau says.

He anticipates that the Federal Reserve will continue to slowly raise rates to try and control inflation, which could lead to a jump in unemployment for jobs in Utah.

It isn’t just interest rate hikes that are affecting the economy. Wars, supply chain issues, and an ongoing global pandemic are problems that continue to grip the world’s economy. It’s a tough spot to be in. “Listen, I would not like to be in charge of setting policy,” Blau says. “There are just so many moving parts and so many things that may be out of the control of the policy-makers. I don’t think I’d want to touch that with a 10-foot pole. It’s a very, very difficult time for sure.”

If that is to come, it could be a while before layoffs truly start to make a dent in jobs in Utah. Unemployment can be a bit of a lagging indicator. For example, the Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, according to Investopedia. Unemployment peaked in October 2009, months after the recession officially ended. 

The brief recession set in motion by the start of the Covid pandemic saw unemployment peak at 14.7 percent in April 2020, the month the recession officially ended. It was the first time in over 70 years that the unemployment associated with a recession didn’t peak while the economy was in recovery, Investopedia reported.

Tech companies, Blau says, are more sensitive to rising interest rates than the average business—and Utah has a lot of those. CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce report says 6.9 percent of the state’s workforce works in tech, the ninth-highest state ranking. 

Despite its reliance on tech jobs in Utah, Blau and Miller are both bullish on the state and its ability to weather the storm. That proved true in each of the last two recessions. Utah’s highest unemployment rate was below the national average in each of the most recent recessions, peaking at eight percent in 2010 and 10 percent in 2020.

Both Blue and Miller mention the diversity of industries in Utah as a key to the state’s success. Miller says the state has “by some measures, the most diverse economy in the country.” 

He’s optimistic when talking about the future of the state’s economy.

“I know in some ways it doesn’t feel that way right now because of inflation and because of housing prices, but compared to the rest of the country, Utah is still a great place to live as it relates to the cost of doing business and cost of living,” Miller says. “All those things put Utah in a strong position, regardless of whatever the national economy is going to do. I won’t say that we’re not tied to it. We certainly are. But history shows us that we come through and weather the storm better than most other places. That gives us hope that whatever is to come, Utah, relatively speaking, is going to be in a strong position.”

What effect inflation, interest rates, and other worldwide events will have on the job market remains to be seen. 

“This is an interesting time,” Blau says. “There’s just so many moving parts on this one. It’s hard to figure out what’s going to happen.”

f you find yourself hitting the soda shop on a daily basis, you might be into the latest product from Thirst: an NFT.

Thirst NFTs are more or less a coupon for free products and discounts, with a “digital playing card” that comes with it. Thirst NFTs are selling at three price points: $400, $600, and $800. Cisneros believes loyal customers will recoup their money within a year.

All NFTs represent an item from the Thirst menu, from popular drinks to cookies to beignets. Holding an item’s NFT depiction entitles the owner to one of those items free per day. 

For example, any drink NFT entitles the holder to a free drink of up to 44 ounces daily. Some NFTs can be redeemed for any item on the menu, and NFTs in the gold or silver rarities ($600 or $800) come with 10 percent and 25 percent discounts on every item in addition to that free daily item.

The price point is based on a customer coming into the store three times per week. If each item is worth $5, that would equate to $780 in free drinks or food, not including any additional discounts. 

“I have people come through my drive-thru every single day spending a lot of money,” says founder Ethan Cisneros.

One key aspect of NFTs is that they can be bought, sold, or transferred. Someone could buy the coupon, use it for a year, then if they decide they’re over soda, they could sell it to someone else—possibly even earning money in the transaction. 

Cisneros likes the fact that it could still hold some value for a customer if they decide they no longer want it. That’s a large part of the value of using NFT technology as opposed to a scannable punch card.

“I call them digital postcards because that’s what they are,” he says. “We’re using NFT technology to create our resellable value-driven asset that’s a digital-first card. I think there are new ways I can explain it that will kind of open people’s eyes… I think more and more people are going to adopt it.”

There are a total of 375 Thirst NFTs out there. About 75 were minted in the first six days of availability, which began in early June. There’s no limited minting period during which people have to rush to get them before they’re gone, as Cisneros didn’t want it to feel like there was pressure on people to make a quick, pressured decision. The remaining NFTs will be available until they sell.Thirst NFTs are launching at a time where many NFTs have dropped in value alongside the cryptocurrency markets, but that doesn’t worry Cisneros. He believes part of the recent drop in NFT valuations can be attributed to many projects’ lack of utility.

“I’m not selling to the crypto community,” he says. “This is a project that is completely different than the existing projects creating this bubble in the market that is… crashing.”

He believes Thirst lifetime passes can benefit customers and help forge “the greatest connection with a customer of all time.” 

“If you own one of my NFTs and there’s a limited amount of them and more people are starting to want them, you have interest in telling everyone about Thirst,” he says. You have interest in making the demand for these NFTs greater because that’s your asset.”

Cisneros opened his first Thirst shop in 2016. It wasn’t popular at first, he admits. Cisneros thinks back to the early days, posting on social media 15 times a day, constantly messaging potential customers with coupons to try and drum up interest in his business.

Since then, Thirst has found some success. Cisneros has opened several new stores throughout the valley, including locations inside Vivint Smart Home Arena and Rio Tinto Stadium, the respective homes of the Utah Jazz and Real Salt Lake. And he has plans for larger expansion—one in Saint George and another 10 and 15 Utah stores before he starts looking at other states. 

But Cisneros doesn’t want to just be a soda chain. He sees Thirst as a “more relevant, cool version of what Sonic is—which is drinks, snacks, and treats,” also drawing a comparison to Auntie Anne’s pretzels. Thirst’s highest-selling item is soft pretzels, despite conceptions of Thirst as just a soda shop, but maybe in the future, the company’s bestselling item will be NFTs.

“Some may fear that DeFi’s goal is to upend the traditional reliance on a central hub of financial operations,” Mountain America’s recent whitepaper reads. But Mountain America Credit Union (MACU) leadership sees an opportunity in the changing world of finance.

“Credit Union = The OG DAO.” That’s what MACU printed on shirts that were given away at Utah’s Cryptopia event. For context, DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. It’s an organizational setup that, when done properly, means decisions are made by a community of members, not a central leadership group. 

Credit unions offer similar services to banks but are nonprofits owned by members who use their services.

“A DAO done properly is a group of people who are treated equally—that’s decentralized in the sense that everybody has equal voting power, and they’re able to then influence, drive, and manage the entity they’re a part of,” MACU CTO Marcus Daley says.

Credit Unions, Daley adds, were originally developed as a way of providing financial services to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had the financial means to access those services. When people pooled their capital together in a group, they could gain some financial power. 

“They were treated as an equal member of the cooperative,” he says. “And in the spirit of a DAO, that really is what a DAO is about.”

In Daley’s opinion, there are only two main differences between a credit union and a DAO. One is that voting at a credit union takes place in an analog manner, with paper contracts as opposed to smart contracts. The other thing is that there are statutes that force a credit union to act in a certain type of way. Other than that, the two structures are very similar.

With this in mind, what does a credit union like Mountain America do with cryptocurrency? 

The Utah-based credit union has 102 locations across six states, with 72 of those locations in Utah. It boasts over a million members on its website. Of the members Daley has encountered, most want some sort of third-party intermediary when dealing with cryptocurrency, and that’s probably not an anomaly.

According to an NYDIG survey, about 22 percent of Americans own Bitcoin. Of those people, 80 percent would store it with a bank or credit union if they had the option and 71 percent of holders would switch to a bank or credit union if it supported Bitcoin.

Daley encourages people to push forward without a third party if they feel comfortable with the current non-custodial user experience for cryptocurrency, which often includes using a hardware wallet and storing cryptocurrency on a jump drive. But for those uncomfortable with navigating that world, credit unions like Mountain America might be able to provide some support

“Today we don’t do anything in crypto, but because so many aspects of how we operate are very similar to crypto, what we’re finding is a lot of people are very warm to the idea of being able to custody with us and then have the option to go out on their own when they need to,” Daley says.Currently, a cryptocurrency exchange like Coinbase can’t offer the typical banking services that a credit union can, and a credit union can’t serve as a crypto exchange. At some point in the future, it’s possible the two won’t be as far apart on that spectrum, and both will be able to offer some of the same services.

And having a credit unions’ involvement in cryptocurrency can help filter out high-risk investments, Daley says. He has seen firsthand the risks of a bad cryptocurrency investment. In 2021, he put what he describes as “much of [his] net worth” in a stablecoin called Iron. Stablecoins are digital assets that are supposed to stay pegged to the US Dollar or another currency while offering some sort of consistent return to holders. Iron lost its peg to the dollar and investors like Daley lost a significant amount of money.

Losing so much of his money left him depressed and unsure how he was going to recover, Daley wrote in a recent blog post.

“What I decided to do was to understand, ‘What did I miss? How did I fall into that?’” He knew the identities of the team behind the stablecoin, he knew the code they were using, so he wanted to figure out what he could have done differently. 

In a perfect world, a third-party group could help filter out risky investments before the investments went wrong, not that it could eliminate all risk. People can still be fooled and investments lose value all the time. 

While it may not have stopped him from diving headfirst into Iron, Daley believes some sort of risk assessment service is missing in cryptocurrency, similar to what groups like Moody’s or S&P Global offer for traditional investments like stocks and bonds.

“Those discussions are happening at different levels within some of these traditional risk assessment firms, but as of yet, nobody has delivered a reliable risk assessment technique—not because it can’t be done, but because this is such a nascent industry it just hasn’t happened yet,” Daley says.

That’s just one of the many changes that could be coming to the crypto world. Whatever other changes may come, Daley believes Mountain America will be ready, although what services the credit union ultimately ends up offering will be dependent on what members are asking for.

“I do think ultimately—and this is why you don’t see a crypto product from us yet—we do have a responsibility to make sure that we truly believe it is going to offer the best outcome for the member,” Daley says.

Patient records have typically been stored by a person’s primary care provider. If that patient has a medical emergency in an area where that primary care provider can be accessed, those records can be utilized. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. For example, if a person moves across the country or goes on vacation and is in a car accident, their records at home can’t be easily accessed.

If a doctor doesn’t have access to past injuries, illnesses, or allergies, that could mean the difference between life and death. One way to solve that? Put medical records on the blockchain.

In October of last year, the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Information Security, put out a report on the possible uses of blockchain in the healthcare world. If electronic health records were to be stored on a blockchain, it stated, this could create a “comprehensive, single source for accurate medical records” that provides insurers with direct access to confirmed healthcare services while helping push forward medical analytics advancements.

That report stated that medical data wouldn’t technically have to be placed on the blockchain, but rather “blockchain-based medical record systems can be linked to existing medical record software and act as an overarching, single view of a patient’s record.”

Galvan, which has its primary offices in Lehi, is one company focused on linking the healthcare and blockchain worlds. Galvan is working to establish itself as a key global source of medical information, from allowing patients to manage and store their personal medical records to showing patients “which treatments are most effective based on outcomes.”

Galvan CEO Adam Sharp says the current health records system process is “clunky.” A graduate of the University of Utah School of Medicine, Sharp says that if medical information changes and a patient develops a new allergy or medical condition outside their primary care provider, that patient would need to go through their primary care provider to change their record.

While physicians are vital to making diagnoses, each person’s individual medical record should belong to that person, Sharp says.“It’s my information. It’s my record. I should have control of it and work with others that can help me to maintain it,” Sharp says. “It’s the way it was always intended, it’s just not been developed in that way.”

With blockchain technology comes the opportunity to incentivize health with cryptocurrency token rewards. Galvan is also working on a health and fitness app that would connect with people’s devices such as smartwatches to reward users with Galvan’s IZE token for meeting the CDC’s recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week. That app is projected to launch later this year.

Blockchain and healthcare technology are constantly evolving, and putting billions of medical records on a blockchain won’t happen overnight.

In 2016, a white paper from business services company Deloitte stated that blockchain technology holds promise for numerous healthcare upgrades, but it’s not a fix that can be immediately applied. However, small steps are already happening.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore published a report in last December’s issue of the medical journal The Lance saying that the Covid pandemic accelerated the need for blockchain in healthcare.

“Although widespread adoption of blockchain technology in health care might still be limited by various [organizational], technological, and governance barriers, the Covid pandemic has clearly accentuated the need for secure, decentralized, multipurpose platforms for coordination of large-scale transfer of sensitive information, such as contact tracing, vaccination status monitoring, and Covid health certificate issuance,” they wrote.

Sharp says that while the healthcare industry is already starting to adopt blockchain technology, though he believes it will be five to 10 years before it is commonplace.

“We won’t solve all problems. We still need good physicians, we still need hospitals,” he says. “But the reality of the matter is that this provides a tool, a resource, and a strategy that is far more trustworthy than the one that currently exists, and that will take time.”