Yesterday Google Cloud said it launched a dedicated digital assets team. Compared to last week’s news that Google Labs and Google Pay are exploring blockchain, the Google Cloud news is far less significant. That’s because it has been earning revenues from blockchain hosting for a couple of years through deals with Hedera, Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain and video network Theta.
One piece of additional news is that Google is “exploring opportunities in the future to enable Google Cloud customers to make and receive payments using cryptocurrencies.”
Google staff will also participate in on-chain governance with certain partners. But they already do so with Hedera and perhaps others.
Many of the services mentioned in its announcement are already part of its current offering, such as deploying validator nodes. BigQuery has supported the ability to query blockchains for years, although the range of blockchains has expanded significantly.
An enterprise focus?
In terms of direction, many of the blockchain and digital assets team come from enterprise backgrounds. Digital assets is a term favored by the enterprise sector. A senior team member hails from Hedera, and another is on its advisory council. Hedera is the enterprise-focused public DLT where only corporate governing council members operate nodes with write permission. A customer experience team member was previously at SAP and enterprise blockchain firm TradeIX.
The digital assets team is headed by Rohit Bhat, whose title is Director Financial Services Capital Markets, Digital Assets, and Exchanges.
