The Indy 500, the world’s largest single-day sporting event, returns this year for its 109th running. Fans can look forward to groundbreaking innovations and an intensely competitive field at the heart of this race: this year’s Indy cars feature a new 2.2-liter twin-turbocharged V6 hybrid engine.

Developed in 2024 by both Chevrolet and Honda, the hybrid system combines a Motor Generator Unit with an Energy Storage System, delivering additional horsepower when drivers need it most. Blair Julian, Team Manager for Chip Ganassi Racing, was kind enough to answer some of our questions about the new hybrid engines:

"The hybrid has added a ton of options on the re-gen and deploy strateg[ies], we are devoting a lot of resources to the SIM and data evaluation of this new and developing tool. There are also a lot of challenges for the engineers and mechanics to develop "Best practices" for the installation to keep the hybrid unit safe and reliable."

Unlike the traditional “push-to-pass” with limited uses, this hybrid boost is unrestricted, allowing drivers to access extra power at any time, adding new layers of strategy and overtaking opportunities throughout the 500-mile contest. See here for more information regarding INDYCAR's hybrid engine technology.

The athletes using this new technology are just as impressive. Ganassi's Álex Palou has won every race but one so far in the 2025 INDYCAR season. Team manager Julian explains, "we help our teammates, cover each other, and minimize mistakes. That's how we compete and win championships."

Rookie Robert Shwartzman, driving for Prema Racing, made headlines by clinching pole position - a remarkable achievement in his first Indy 500.

Josef Newgarden is attempting to become the first driver to win three Indy 500s in a row - a feat never before accomplished. Newgarden will start from the last row and must pass 31 cars to make history.

Helio Castroneves is chasing a record breaking fifth Indy 500 victory, aiming to surpass legends A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, and Rick Mears, with whom he currently shares the all-time record of four wins.

At speeds exceeding 230 mph, these athletes will be kept safe by the SAFER barrier which continues to be one of the most significant safety innovations in motorsport since its Indy 500 debut in 2002. The success of the barrier has led to widespread adoption at tracks around the world.

The fusion of performance, safety, and engineering excellence at the Indianapolis 500 demonstrates how motorsport drives innovation beyond the racetrack. From hybrid powertrains that inform future vehicle design to cutting-edge safety technologies that save lives, the Indy 500 remains not only a thrilling display of speed and skill - but also a proving ground for the automotive technologies of tomorrow.

As Future Wonder continues to expand our technology expertise across both blockchain and traditional finance sectors, we’re always exploring new platforms to help clients make informed build-versus-buy decisions.

At last year’s FIA conference in Chicago, we connected with representatives from Aeron—an open-source messaging system gaining traction in financial technology. Aeron has already been adopted by capital markets firms worldwide, with dedicated support from Adaptive, a consultancy specializing in Aeron implementations.

Aeron addresses a core problem in financial systems: how to send and receive large volumes of time-sensitive data with extreme reliability and minimal latency. In markets where microseconds can make or break trades, traditional messaging layers often fall short. Aeron solves this by offering high-throughput, low-latency communication through features like hardware acceleration, shared memory transport, and lock-free algorithms. These optimizations reduce the unpredictable delays introduced by garbage collection and thread contention—issues that plague many general-purpose messaging tools.

Built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Aeron supports Java, Kotlin, and other JVM-based languages. This makes it a strong fit for integration into both traditional financial systems and off-chain blockchain infrastructure, including decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

Our development team recently worked with Aeron as part of a small-scale market data demo. We found Aeron to be a highly technical and hands-on platform - one that demands a deeper understanding of concurrency, network configuration, and real-time systems to achieve the best results. It has a steep learning curve but is highly customizable, allowing teams to fine-tune the system for for a focus on low latency and / or high throughput.

Future Wonder remains committed to evaluating and adopting forward-thinking financial technologies. Platforms like Aeron have the potential to jumpstart new projects and enhance existing solutions for our clients—whether in capital markets, fintech, or blockchain infrastructure. Ready to accelerate your financial tech stack? Future Wonder helps teams build custom, high-performance systems using tools like Aeron. See how we can help →

Part 2: The Human Future of AI

You are ready to start your work day and open your laptop. Your personal AI agent pops up to tell you about your day, any important prep it can help you with, and shares project items and coding activities it has worked on overnight for you. This is likely to be a reality as soon as next year. As we look toward what many call the coming "paradigm inversion" - where AI agents increasingly work machines on our behalf - we're asking a fundamental question: what kind of people will thrive in this new landscape?

That's why we created our AI Charioteer internship program for Summer 2025. We're looking for developers and engineers, who can evolve alongside tech; driving various AI tools toward meaningful goals, documenting both the successes and failures that help us learn.

The shift in hiring practices is gradually taking shape. We are working out how to identify skilled Charioteers who will be satisfied delegating their tasks to AIs while maintaining critical oversight. The ideal candidates understand both human and machine capabilities - acting as translators between business needs and AI capabilities. Our Charioteers don't just operate tools; they orchestrate them, combining models in creative ways. Experiments using ChatGPT to generate and Claude 3.5 to evaluate demonstrate that human-directed collaboration often produces better results than either system alone.

What we're ultimately working toward is a world where machines adapt to humans, not the reverse. The future belongs not to those who code the fastest, but to those who guide AI systems with wisdom, creativity, and human values. Our AI Charioteer program focuses on learning to steer these powerful technologies while ensuring they serve human needs and maintain appropriate safeguards.

If you're excited about exploring this frontier with us, please reach out and speak with our human team about your product needs by clicking here to learn more.

Part 1: Today's AI Landscape

We've witnessed an explosion of large language models (LLMs) transforming our digital workflows, and while they're not always correct, we're finding they can be tremendous productivity multipliers. In our day-to-day work, we've seen that LLMs can draft code, generate content, and automate repetitive tasks in a fraction of the time it would take us to do manually.

What's truly exciting for us is the transition toward AI agents capable of self-correction, often operating as part of what researchers are calling a "constellation" of specialized models. Recent academic work from Hippocratic AI demonstrates how these systems can collaborate to achieve more reliable outcomes than any single model. We're fascinated by how this mirrors human teamwork - different specialists coordinating to solve complex problems.

We're finding that our greatest successes come from embracing our unique strengths alongside AI capabilities. Peer review remains essential - we're exploring how AI can formally check and correct our work while maintaining human oversight. In coding projects, we've discovered that AI performs dramatically better when provided with structured environments like test suites. This two-way relationship - AI generating code from tests, or tests from code - exemplifies the collaborative potential we're only beginning to tap.

The multi-model approach is already proving successful in tools like Plandex, a coding agent that combines strengths from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to achieve significantly better results than any single provider's models. With capabilities including automatic context management and configurable automation, it represents a shift toward AI systems that can handle complex tasks while still needing human guidance. Tools like Cursor can now automatically retry failed generations with different approaches, showing how AI adaptivity can complement human creativity.

Future Wonder is thrilled to be invited to the Heartland Blockchain Summit, a uniquely Midwest conference designed to bring together blockchain innovators, builders, and curious minds from across the region.

Hosted in the heart of the country, the Summit is one of the Midwest’s key crypto events—offering a chance to connect with regional leaders in the digital economy, learn about emerging trends, and explore how blockchain is transforming industries from finance to biotech.

This year’s speaker lineup is packed with standout voices in the space, including Vivian Fang Chair in Finance at the Kelly School of Business, Ian Taylor, CEO and Cofounder of SIMBA Chain, and Logan Panchot, CEO of Clear Contracts and Co-Founder of Clarity DAO Protocol. Attendees will also hear from J.J. Thompson, Founder at Spektrum Labs, and Yan Zhuang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics.

At Future Wonder, we’re passionate about advancing the future of decentralized technology. We stand out with our unique ability to blend innovative blockchain technology with our UI/UX design to build end-to-end robust solutions across the Web3 stack. This includes blockchain consulting, infrastructure development, smart contract engineering, and full-stack dApp design and development.

From launching NFT and DeFi projects to building DAO ecosystems, we provide the strategy, engineering, and support to bring blockchain ideas to life. You can learn more about our Blockchain offering here.

We will also be available to discuss our AI Charioteer initiative, and our Traditional Finance offerings that we have provided to clients for 9+ years.

Whether you're deep in Web3 or just blockchain-curious, the Heartland Blockchain Summit is the place to be. See you there!

Part 1 here

Limitations

Typically, most of what can be built in high-code can be built in low-code but low-code is not always the best way to build things. A main limitation of Low-Code is the lack of fine grain control of the underlying code and build structure. This is also part of what makes low-code development so easy to maintain as much of it is managed for you. Testing the application must happen from the outside as low-code vendors don't offer the ability to test components in the implementation. Low-code applications often will not scale past 1000s of simultaneous users without hitting the barriers and limitations of the host platform. Many expanding businesses will outgrow their low-code implementations and invest in high-code migration as they need to scale to larger user bases and higher quality. Stagetime went through this transformation. Low-code development is also often not the best choice for applications with specific performance needs, multimedia applications or extensive legacy system integration. Our client Soloist has a proprietary mobile application that can record and synchronize and play back multiple sound loops - this is outside the capabilities of current low-code platforms.

What is Low-Code best for?

Ultimately, where low-code shines is for minimum viable software products, and custom internal tools (like workflow management, data integration, custom CRMs, etc.). This is especially true when you need these built fast, or within a tighter budget.

The Future

With many low-code building platforms now allowing for easy integrations with AI, we are now seeing low-code being used to build even more advanced tools that have AI integrated into them. The current generation of AI models are error prone; however they are beginning to offer a significant acceleration for prototyping on low-code platforms. Businesses will build more tools for internal use that can add AI reasoning into their human managed workflows. At Future Wonder we are planning to explore this and other approaches in the summer of 2025 with our AI Charioteer project. Have you gotten an idea for a software build that you thought would be too expensive for your budget or take too long to build? Maybe it’s time to consider if a tool built in Low-Code is the right choice for you. To set up a free consultation for your potential low-code software development project contact us here

At Future Wonder, we believe that strong communities are built on collaboration, innovation, and shared vision. That’s why we’re excited to announce our new membership with the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation (BEDC). Since 1985, the BEDC has been a driving force behind Bloomington’s economic success, working to create new opportunities and attract high-quality jobs to the region. With over 100 member organizations—spanning private, public, and nonprofit sectors—the BEDC brings businesses together to drive progress. Among these, 56 are Sponsor Members, 41 are General Members (including us!), and 6 hold Special Memberships. Future Wonder is proud to be part of this dynamic network, working alongside other businesses to support local economic growth.

One of the BEDC’s most ambitious initiatives is the Economic Vitality Project (EVP), launched in 2022. This community-wide effort focuses on creating a shared vision for Bloomington’s future, strengthening its brand identity, and directing investments toward meaningful local initiatives. Phase one of the EVP gathered insights from 630+ community surveys, 140+ participants in committees, focus groups, and interviews, and a review of 40 strategic plans across Monroe County. As the project moves into its next phase, the BEDC is expanding its efforts to turn these insights into action, and we’re eager to support this work in any way we can.

By joining forces with the BEDC, we’re not just aligning with their mission—we’re actively contributing to it. This shared emphasis on collaboration and growth positions Future Wonder as an active participant in advancing the BEDC’s vision of a thriving, interconnected business community. With the BEDC’s resources and community-driven approach, we’re better positioned than ever to help attract opportunities, strengthen the local business landscape, and build a future where businesses and people alike can succeed. This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together.