The companies announced Wednesday that Google Cloud is partnering with the Tezos Foundation to advance the development of its web3 applications and provide new services to its customers.
“Tezos as an ecosystem has built a reputation for institutional and B2B onboarding,” Mason Edwards, chief business officer of the Tezos Foundation, told TechCrunch.
“This will allow us to bring institutions and even more massive institutions into this space. This will be jet fuel and octane.”
The partnership plans to make it easy for all Google Cloud customers to become Tezos “bakers” or network validators.
Bakers are part of Tezos’ proof-of-stake mechanism that helps run the protocol and earn rewards. Google Cloud will also become a baker, joining existing bakers such as gaming company Ubisoft.
Tezos
Tezos is an open source blockchain that has more than 2.3 million funded accounts with a total of 158.6 million transactions, according to its website.
It also partners and builds with major brands and companies such as Manchester United, McLaren and Société Générale among others.
Last month, Tezos partnered with the California DMV to help the agency digitize car titles and place title transfers on a private blockchain created by Tezos to streamline operations.
“Institutions are paying attention and realizing that this is going to be a space for disruption.
Whether you’re a retailer looking after loyalty programs or consumer engagement or a large institution, blockchain will disrupt parts of your industry,” said Edwards.
Tezos also sees the partnership as an “extremely strong signal” to the developer community to have a massive infrastructure platform like Google Cloud on board, Edwards added.
“Web3 developers and enterprises are looking for improved development tools and infrastructure that can help accelerate their product timelines,”.
James Tromans, CTO of web3 at Google Cloud, told TechCrunch. “Developers know the value of great technology.
We see an opportunity to provide differentiated offerings that build on a foundation that similarly supports many of the products and services that blockchain developers are trying to build.”
One example of how Google Cloud is trying to address this is through its Blockchain Node Engine on Ethereum.
A dedicated node service that uses Google Cloud to develop blockchain-based applications, Tromans noted.
“More companies, big and small, also want to participate in the chain,” Tromans said.
“They want the ability to read and write on-chain to deploy blockchain-based applications.”
To visualize on-chain data at scale, Google Cloud hosts several public BigQuery datasets on its marketplace.
Including the complete blockchain transaction history for networks such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Litecoin, Zcash, Theta, Hedera Hashgraph, Band Protocol, Polygon, XRP and Dogecoin.
Through the company’s nurturing program, new and existing Google Cloud customers will be able to build web 3 applications as well as deploy nodes and indexers on the Tezos protocol.
This means that companies and developers can use the Tezos blockchain technology together with the Google Cloud infrastructure.
“Launching nodes at scale is time-consuming, expensive and ultimately distracts from building core products,” said Tromans.
The “core” of the partnership revolves around supporting Tezos’ company baking program, which aims to reduce friction for companies looking to participate in the chain and help developers deploy nodes on its blockchain, Tromans noted.
At its core, the goal of the Google Cloud partnership is to lower the barrier to entry for developers to build on the Tezos blockchain, Tromans said.
“It’s not just about reducing technological barriers, as we are aware that startups in the web3 ecosystem require other forms of support, such as mentorship and ways to reduce infrastructure costs,” added Tromans.
“This is another area where Google Cloud is partnering with the Tezos Foundation to provide this type of support to select startups in the web3 ecosystem.”
In general, Google Cloud plans to continue partnering with “key players in the web3 ecosystem” to keep innovation growing for open source technologies, Tromans said.
“It is not a transactional relationship; instead, it’s about finding opportunities to empower and enable founders and developers to grow the ecosystem.”
Outside of the partnership, Google Cloud plans to focus this year on “the core principles at the core of blockchain technology,” Tromans said.
“We are excited to create products that address these needs.”
The partnership is also set to provide selected Tezos startup incubators with Google Cloud credits and mentorship through the Google for Startups cloud program.
“At Google Cloud, we provide a secure and reliable infrastructure for Web3 founders and developers to innovate and scale their applications,” said James Tromans, CTO of Web3 at Google Cloud.
Meanwhile, Tezos Foundation Chief Commercial Officer Mason Edwards said the partnership is a step toward achieving institutional adoption and mass market opportunities for Web3 technology.
In January 2022, Google Cloud created a dedicated digital asset team to facilitate the growth and development of the blockchain ecosystem.
The main goal of the team was to help Google Cloud clients generate, exchange, store value and launch new products on blockchain-based platforms.
In October, the Near Foundation unveiled a new collaboration between the Near Protocol and Google Cloud. The partnership was to offer infrastructure support for Near Web3’s startup platform, Pagoda.
Sources: Techcrunch | cointelegraph