Google Cloud is hiring a lot of blockchain experts and may accept cryptocurrency payments in the future

BITU News, Google Cloud (Google Cloud) is hiring a team of blockchain experts to take advantage of the transition to decentralized Web 3 applications, according to CNBC. Google Cloud will build its business around blockchain applications to make a big splash in retail, healthcare and other industries.

In the third quarter of 2021, Google parent company Alphabet generated about 82 percent of its revenue from its advertising business. If the strategy goes well, it will help Google diversify its revenue and further carve out a slice of the market from the remote computing and storage services market.

The new digital asset strategy team is headed by Rich Widmann, who previously worked as a product consultant in Google’s legal department, Widmann confirmed in a personal tweet.

Decentralization efforts

Blockchain advocates often talk about building decentralized applications that remove large intermediaries from controlling some kind of power or information, and DeFi (decentralized finance) has emerged as a soaring segment of the crypto market, aiming to remove intermediaries such as banks from traditional financial transactions such as lending.

With DeFi, programmable code called smart contracts will replace banks or lawyers in traditional finance. Smart contracts are written on a public blockchain, such as ethereum or solana, and automatically execute programs when certain conditions are met, without the need for intermediaries.

This concept of decentralized applications is becoming increasingly popular among technologists who preach Web3, a decentralized version of the Internet that departs from Web 2.0, which saw the explosion of user-generated content (such as blogs and social networks), with some of these services eventually coming under the control of large Internet companies, including the acquisition of Blogger and YouTube (now one of its most powerful businesses) by Google.

Today, cloud computing providers such as Amazon and Google operate vast facilities that provide computing services to millions of customers, representing a “highly centralized version of Web 2.0.

We believe that if we get the job done, we will drive the decentralization of power,” Widmann said.

Google Cloud may accept encrypted payments in the future

Google Cloud Marketplace already provides developers with tools that can start building blockchain networks, with customers including blockchain companies such as Dapper Labs, Hedera and Theta Labs and several crypto exchanges, and Google also provides datasets where people can use the BigQuery service to explore the transaction history of bitcoin and other currencies.

Widmann hinted that Google Cloud may be able to accept cryptocurrency payments in the future. “There are things we can do to reduce the friction that some customers have in using cryptocurrencies to pay for centralized cloud computing,” he said. Foundations and other entities in the digital asset space capitalize primarily on cryptocurrencies, he said.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has identified retail, health care and three other industries as target areas, and Widmann said Google can help as customers in those industries choose to adopt blockchain technology.

Explosive growth of crypto curiosity in traditional sectors

Other traditional cloud providers are also curious about cryptocurrencies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which leads the cloud infrastructure market with a 40.8 percent share in 2020, announced a hosted blockchain service in 2018, according to technology industry researcher Gartner, and the AWS service’s website identifies Accenture, AT&T and Nestle as customers. Infrastructure startup Alchemy is looking to become the AWS of the blockchain market, having recently raised $250 million in a Series C funding round valued at $3.5 billion, as previously reported by BizTrust.

Microsoft, which Gartner says has a 19.7 percent share in 2020, launched a fully hosted Azure blockchain service in 2019 but discontinued it in September, citing “reduced customer interest.

Smaller cloud providers are also recognizing the opportunity.

Gabe Monroy, chief product officer at DigitalOcean, which focuses on small and midsize businesses, said in a CNBC interview, “We have a lot of blockchain and crypto customers on our platform, and it’s one of the biggest growth parts of our 2021, and it’s definitely an area we’ll be watching closely.”

Crypto companies are also starting to open their doors to software developers. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has formed a Coinbase Cloud division to allow other companies to develop crypto projects - including crypto payments, transactions, data access and pledges - using the Coinbase Cloud API and blockchain infrastructure.

It’s kind of like AWS for crypto, and we’re trying to externalize some of the services we have to build,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said at the JPMorgan Chase Crypto Economy Forum in November. We’ve been doing a lot of hard exploration on how to store cryptocurrencies and integrate all the blockchain, monitor transactions for anti-money laundering purposes and do transactions and pledges and so on.”

Google executive Shivakumar Venkataraman has taken the lead on a new blockchain team, which is separate from the cloud team for digital assets, Bloomberg reported last week.

Google is also exploring the NFT space. As previously reported by BizTweet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in her annual letter to content creators that the YouTube video service has been deeply inspired by Web3. “This past year has been a previously unimaginable opportunity to strengthen the connection between creators and their fans in the world of cryptocurrencies, non-homogeneous tokens (NFTs) and even decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs),” she wrote.

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