Aptos and Google Cloud unveil partnership, plan for accelerator program

Layer 1 blockchain startup Aptos said it has partnered with Google Cloud in a move that will see the search giant power some of its validator nodes, among other services. 

Speaking at a panel at Token2049 in London, Aptos co-founder and CEO Mo Shaikh outlined the details of the tie-up alongside Simon Baksys, the go-to-market and business development lead for Google’s web3 division.

“I think the first time a web2 and a web3 company has come together in such a meaningful way,” Shaikh said.

Google Cloud will validate nodes and participate on the Aptos mainnet, Shaikh said. The Aptos blockchain will also be indexed and made available on Google Cloud’s BigQuery service. 

The partnership aims to encourage new talent, with Google and the Aptos Foundation set to launch an accelerator program as well as co-host a hackathon next year. The Aptos blockchain is already known for attracting Solana developers who had become tired of “eating glass” on Solana and were looking for a more intuitive way to program decentralized applications.

“It should really be interesting to see those two worlds collide and those projects that will be interested in using both Google tools as well as Aptos tools to produce something really cool,” Baksys said. “We’ll definitely be continuing our quote unquote world tour and engaging with the community together.”

What’s is Aptos?

Aptos, a new blockchain co-founded by Shaikh and Avery Ching, both of whom previously worked on Meta’s Diem project. 

The chain uses Move, a programming language that builds on top of Rust — the language used on the Solana blockchain. Move was developed by Meta for the Diem project.

The Aptos blockchain raised $350 million from investors this year including FTX Ventures, a16z and Multicoin Capital. It launched on mainnet a few weeks ago.

Aptos lead backer FTX Ventures is facing an uncertain future after its parent company crypto exchange FTX announced it was facing a  “liquidity crunch” earlier this week and that it would be acquired by rival exchange Binance. The deal with Binance fell through last night.

FTX Venture’s head of ventures Amy Wu appeared to be unaware of FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s strategy surrounding the venture arm writing “Truth. Need to update my LinkedIn” in response to a tweet thread that suggested FTX and Alameda were conducting a fire sale of its venture holdings.

Google moves deeper into web3

Earlier this year, Google Cloud became Aptos’s inaugural cloud partner. The partnership enabled anyone to spin up a node on the Aptos network in less than 15 minutes, the company said at the time. The latest announcement is an extension of the partnership and comes almost a month following the blockchain company’s launch on mainnet.

Google Cloud formed a dedicated digital assets team earlier this year and has announced a number of partnerships with web3 companies so far.

From early 2023, Coinbase will enable select Google customers to pay for cloud services using crypto and Google will use Coinbase Prime for its institutional services. Google Cloud will also add support for Solana on its BigQuery platform starting next year, which will make it easier for developers to query Solana data.

The division also launched a blockchain-node hosting engine last month.

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