Google’s cloud unit is forming a team to build services for developers running blockchain applications as the company tries to capitalize on the surging popularity of crypto and related projects.
The team will be led by James Tromans, a former Citigroup executive who has been at Google since 2019. Tromans, will lead the product and engineering group and report to Amit Zavery, Google Cloud unit vice president. Together, they will bring together employees involved in Web3 internally and on their own.
With the service, Google wants to offer back-end services to developers interested in composing their own Web3 software as the company builds a foundation to cement its market share in cloud infrastructure.
In building an in-house team for Web3 tools, Google is taking its next step to prove its commitment to the market. In January, Google’s cloud unit revealed plans for a Digital Assets Team to work with customers, following the emerging growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The company said it was looking at how customers could make payments with cryptocurrencies.
CNBC Says, Amit Zavery, told employees in an email that the idea is to make the Google Cloud Platform the first choice for developers in the field.
“While the world is still early in its embrace of Web3, it is a market that is already demonstrating tremendous potential with many customers asking us to increase our support for Web3 and Crypto-related technologies,” he wrote.
Pioneers of Web3, such as Amazon have created a set of decentralized and peer-to-peer systems that they hope will form the next generation of the internet.
“We’re not trying to be part of that cryptocurrency wave directly, We’re providing technologies for companies to use and take advantage of the distributed nature of Web3 in their current businesses and enterprises,” Zavery said in an interview with CNBC.
Going forward, Google could devise a system other companies could employ to make blockchain data easy for people to explore while simplifying the process of building and running blockchain nodes for validating and recording transactions, Zavery said. He added that Google’s tools can work in other computing environments, such as Amazon Web Services.
Enthusiasm around bitcoin, the most established cryptocurrency, has tapered off this year as investors have turned away from risky assets. As of late Thursday, bitcoin was down 21% so far in 2022, underperforming the S&P 500, which has dropped to about 13 per cent.
But blockchain applications continue to find their way into the mainstream and have increasing relevance in industries such as financial services and retail, said Zavery.
Google trails Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, a business that is growing faster than its core advertising unit.
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