Google recently announced a new team within its cloud services division that will focus on supporting customers working with blockchain-based platforms, offering financial institutions interested in blockchain and digital assets a potential new technical partner.
Google Cloud already offers some services employed by companies using distributed ledgers — blockchain is a type of distributed ledger — as does Amazon (through Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft (through Azure). The Thursday announcement indicates Google will provide additional support around distributed ledger technologies through its new Digital Assets Team.
Banks have been engaged in blockchain projects for the past 10 years, many of them short-lived. Most recently, financial institutions have partnered with companies like Figure Technologies and Tassat Pay to use blockchain-based payment systems. The largest cloud providers have in the past year shifted their blockchain strategies. Microsoft Azure dropped its public blockchain service in May only to launch a new service supporting private blockchains two weeks later. Amazon’s blockchain service started out providing private blockchain management and added support for large public blockchain Ethereum in March.
Yolande Piazza, vice president of financial services for Google Cloud and former CEO of Citi FinTech, said in last week’s announcement the purpose of the company’s new team would be to “support our customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value, and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms.”
Google’s announcement pointed out three companies that have built their distributed ledgers on Google Cloud. Hedera, which markets its distributed ledger as the successor to Bitcoin and Ethereum; Theta Labs, which built a decentralized video streaming platform; and Dapper, which hosts nonfungible tokens (NFTs) including NBA Top Shot on its blockchain.
The new Google Cloud team’s name nods to the NFT phenomenon that recently spun out of the blockchain technology, and Piazza alluded to the tokens as a use case of Google Cloud in the list of “three key reasons” to choose the product.
“Google can ensure that data, applications, games, or digital assets like NFTs will be delivered on a stable, secure, and trusted global network,” she said.
