Google Cloud and Solana collaboration

The first week of November 2022 was rich in events. Last but not least, Google Cloud announced its partnership with Solana. What to expect from the largest cloud platform and well-known blockchain project? How Google Cloud managed to fuel hype and pump up SOL by 10% in just one minute? In this insightful article, we'll cover all these issues and much more.

Let's briefly review Google Cloud and Solana projects:

Google Cloud is a result of Google's many years of experience with Big Data and global infrastructure. It improves data management and reduces expenses for server maintenance and network configuration. Google Cloud provides any business/project/service owner with 24-hour access to their servers, networks, and disks from anywhere globally with no security or convenience concerns. 

The platform aims to transform today's business and modernize the architecture, deployment, and management of systems, storage, and other computing power with Google's global infrastructure. 

Google Cloud has already dealt with crypto projects earlier this year. They teamed up with Coinbase to let its users make crypto payments for cloud services.

The main features of Google Cloud. Source: cloud.google.com

Solana is a third-generation blockchain designed to host a variety of DeFi solutions, including the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts. The main feature of the project is its own approach to achieving network scalability. It employs a bundle of unique techniques to achieve high transaction speeds. The project team claims that their blockchain can support more than 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) at peak load. This makes Solana the fastest blockchain in the industry (1,000 times faster than Bitcoin).

8 Core Solana Innovations. Source: research.thetie.io

Now that we learned about the features of both projects, let's see what to expect from their collaboration.

On November 5, 2022, Google Cloud's official account teased its followers with a tweet that tagged Solana CEO Anatolii Yakovenko. “Should we tell our followers the big news?”, reads the message. This prompted immediate community feedback, with Solana's native token (SOL) climbing 10% in a minute. As of November 6, Solana's SOL spiked 15%.  

In a Twitter thread, Google Cloud announced that it will run a Solana validator “to participate in and validate the network”. They plan to bring their Blockchain Node Engine to Solana's network in 2023. Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node-hosting service run by the provider, which already supports the Ethereum blockchain.

“We want to make it one-click to run a Solana node in a cost-effective way”, said Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal at Solana's Breakpoint conference in Lisbon.

Google Cloud also announced that they will index and record Solana data, as well as bring it to their BigQuery (a web service that supports big data analysis). This will make it “easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access its historical data.” According to Mittal, this feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023.

Source: Solana Breakpoint Twitter

Without any loss of time, Google is looking for experienced Web3 DeFi protocol specialists. Google Blockchain Node Engine will initially support the Ethereum blockchain, and might later expand to other networks.