This ETH integration, are you a baker, baker, stacker or maker?
If you tune in to Web3, the biggest news of the week in tech wasn’t the giant Fig-Adobe deal. No, the leading story of the last few days – even the last few weeks – has been the Ethereum merger.
Merger, the Ethereum blockchain update that moved from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus system, was finally a long-awaited change this week. And with the technological change expected to reduce the carbon footprint of the popular blockchain by ~99%, we had a lot to go on.
But we didn’t want to just splurge on the startup angle or the Web3 perspective because integration meant a lot to crypto as an industry and its place in the emerging tech world. That’s why we’ve brought together our startup and blockchain podcast teams, Anita and Jackie from Chain Reaction and Natasha and Alex from Equity, to hit both angles. And that gave us a 50-50 TechCrunch-TechCrunch+ split, which was good fun.
We begin to set the scene by looking at how the speculation surrounding this massive event on Web 3 has affected the token’s price and under what circumstances it has created optimism. Then we broke the mechanics behind it why Proof of stake is greener, but probably less decentralized than proof of work (although we each had different opinions on whether that was a fair assessment).
Launching the merger was an event that required technical coordination and rigor comparable to the moon landing. Now that it has happened, what impact will it have on the launch of Web 3? What about the rest of the tech industry, or large financial institutions, or Chinese crypto miners? We’ve gone through these questions and more, trying to address what integration is and why it’s important from as comprehensive a lens as possible.
Just as there are many stakeholders affected by the merger, all of whom think differently, so do we. The team as a “baker” and what it means in the proof of use ecosystem and the schedule that comes after the merger, including Surge, Verge, Purge and Splurge. No joke – we’ll explain what that means in this episode.
We’ll be doing this sort of thing as time goes on, with some welcome input glitches for our production staff (big shout out to Grace, Teresa and Maggie).
For more on integration, required reading is available here , here , and here . in the future!
Fairness It drops every Monday at 7 am PDT and Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 am PDT, so subscribe to us Apple Podcasts, Exaggerated, Spotify AAnd all the actors.
