The Merge is upon us (and other TC news)

This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Natasha about the Y Combinator Demo Day for the Summer 2022 cohort; the highs, the lows, the new management and whether the accelerator moving to be more in-person-focused is a help or a hindrance to its further-flung participants. Then, ever a crypto-sceptic at heart, I was delighted to get the chance to talk with Anita about the upcoming Ethereum chain merge.

First, the YC Demo Day. “The things that have stood out to me so far is that it’s a more Bay Area-based program. YC announced that about 30% of the cohort moved to the Bay Area during the accelerator and about 23% were already in the Bay Area, when they applied,” Natasha said. “We see a bifurcation being created between the people who could (or already did) live in the Bay Area and YC’s international focus. To me, that’s an interesting tension we’re seeing play out a little bit in the batch metrics.”

On the blockchain side of things, I was curious if the proverbial wheels were going to come off. Anita didn’t seem too worried. “All of the engineers I’ve talked to don’t seem to be too concerned. This has been a point of discussion since 2016; it’s been discussed, debated and tested a bunch of times. Someone compared it to the moon landing,” said Anita (and explains the analogy in the podcast episode). “It is this huge, risky thing. It seems like a really big deal. But so much practice and preparation has gone into this process that I personally wouldn’t expect anything significant to go wrong in the process itself.”