The interest of the big technology companies in the blockchain and its ramifications is increasingly evident. This time it was the turn of Google, which formed a team that will be dedicated to investigating and experimenting with said technology.
As published by Bloomberg, the new blockchain unit of the Mountain View firm is under the direction of Shivakumar Venkataraman, who was already serving as vice president of engineering at Google. In any case, the details are scarce since the company itself chose not to comment on the subject.
The aforementioned report mentions that the work of the new team will focus not only on the blockchain, but also on “next-generation technologies for distributed computing and data storage”. This could serve as an indication that Google's interest could also lie in Web3, the decentralized internet project.
And since Venkataraman has been credited as the author of research on multi-machine networking and distributed computing, it would not be unusual for the blockchain group's approach to go that route. Anyway, as long as there is no more data from the corporation, we can only speculate.
Google begins to pay real attention to the blockchain
Photo by Rajeshwar Bachu on Unsplash As we mentioned in the first lines of this article, the blockchain is increasingly attracting the main companies in the technology field. Google has followed in the footsteps of Twitter, which has already formed its own team dedicated to exploring the technology behind the blockchain.
But in the case of the social network, it was clarified that the roadmap was aimed at cryptocurrencies, although not exclusively. After all, the name chosen for the team was Twitter Crypto. Tess Rinearson, the team leader, had stated that the intention was to support the interest of developers in decentralized applications, and then focus on crypto solutions.
However, some of this could also be behind Google's interest in the blockchain. Another report from Bloomberg indicates that the Mountain View firm recently hired Arnold Goldberg, previously at PayPal, to work on Google Pay. Its incorporation would be related to the search for a broader coverage of financial services, according to Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce. And this would also cover cryptocurrencies, since the new executive would come with experience from the platform co-founded by Elon Musk.
Let's remember that Google tried to get its hands on the banking sector, but abandoned its plans without making too much noise. The idea of the company was to join forces with a dozen banks to launch their own checking accounts; and there was even talk of the possibility of having your own debit card issued by Mastercard. However, everything came to nothing, at least until now.
We'll see if the interest in the blockchain really leads to Google's foray into the world of cryptocurrencies, something that not all corporations have been encouraged to experiment with.
