The official announcement was made a few days ago: Google Cloud launches a new team dedicated to digital assets and blockchain.
Google Cloud, the blockchain and digital assets
The announcement was made by Yolanda Piazza, namely the Vice President of Financial Services at Google Cloud, who reveals that the company believes Google Cloud can play an important role in this evolution.
Piazza says that blockchain technology is delivering huge innovation and creating a lot of value for consumers and businesses around the world.
She also says the technology is becoming increasingly mainstream, so much so that companies that want to use it need to use a scalable, secure and sustainable infrastructure.
That infrastructure could be Google Cloud, which is why the company is opening it up to digital assets and blockchain. To do so, it has created a new team dedicated expressly to digital assets, to support clients’ needs in creating, exchanging, storing funds and distributing new blockchain-based products.
Piazza cites blockchain and DLT companies such as Hedera, Theta Labs and Dapper Labs that are already using Google Cloud services, but the company wants to further expand its presence in this area.
In fact, it intends to provide dedicated nodes for developers, on-chain validation and governance services, but also help developers host their nodes on the cloud.
It also intends to make several public BigQuery datasets available on its Marketplace, including the complete history of transactions recorded on the blockchains of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Litecoin, Zcash, Theta, Hedera Hashgraph, Band Protocol, Polygon, XRP and Dogecoin.
Will Google drag mass adoption of cryptocurrencies?
Google Cloud Marketplace’s involvement is what suggests that, most likely, crypto payments will also be enabled, as “digital assets” just seems like a more institutional way to refer to tokens and cryptocurrencies, as well as NFTs.
In fact, Piazza writes:
“As we build out our team, we’re also exploring opportunities in the future to enable Google Cloud customers to make and receive payments using cryptocurrencies”.
The entry of a giant like Google into this market could finally get mass adoption off the ground, even though Google Cloud is a platform used primarily by businesses, and not consumers.
With the potential acceptance of crypto payments on the Google Cloud Marketplace, it could be argued that the “clearance” of cryptocurrencies would be definitive, and most likely irreversible.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/01/31/google-cloud-opens-digital-assets/