Jai Sahu
Google Cloud has rolled out a new Web3 portal aimed at providing blockchain developers with resources such as data sets and tutorials on creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, the reception from the cryptocurrency community has been varied.
Phil Geiger, the vice president of product marketing at Unchained, expressed disappointment on April 25 via an X post, criticizing the lack of native Bitcoin and lightning network support, stating, “No native Bitcoin and lightning support? Seems like an oversight to ignore the most important cryptocurrency.”
Another critical voice came from MartyParty, a pseudonymous crypto trader, who shared his dissatisfaction with his 80,700 followers on X on April 26, commenting, “Not impressed Google is way behind.”
Conversely, some industry participants welcomed the initiative. Ivaibi Festo, founder of Mitroplus labs, praised the Web3 portal as a “comprehensive resource” in an X post dated April 25.
Google Cloud’s website outlines that developers can utilize a variety of products and receive testnet tokens to deploy and test their decentralized applications on Ethereum testnets such as Sepolia and Holesky.
The portal also features a learning program that includes tutorials on developing an NFT, implementing Web3 loyalty programs, and securing digital assets with multi-party computation.
These developments follow several significant moves by Google in the Web3 space.
Recently, Google enhanced its features to enable users to search wallet balances across multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon, and Fantom.
At the beginning of 2024, Google updated its policies to permit the advertisement of specific crypto products, including Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, on major search engines.
In preparation for this year鈥檚 portal launch, Google focused on forging partnerships in 2023.
In October 2023, Google Cloud鈥檚 BigQuery data warehouse was integrated with MultiversX, aiding Web3 projects and users in leveraging powerful data analytics and artificial intelligence tools within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Just a month earlier, in September 2023, Google鈥檚 BigQuery expanded its blockchain network support, adding 11 new networks such as Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum鈥檚 G枚rli testnet, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon鈥檚 mainnet, Polygon鈥檚 Mumbai testnet, and Tron.