Google Cloud has revealed that it is currently running a validator on the Solana blockchain and that it will soon offer functionality to welcome Solana developers and node runners.
Following the announcement, Solana's native token SOL surged by about 15%, with a current price of nearly $40.
Because the Blockchain Node Engine is a "fully managed node hosting service" that Ethereum users are already familiar with, integrating Solana would make the network easily available and accessible to everyone.
"We want to make it one-click to run a Solana node in a cost-effective way," Google Web3 Product Manager Nalin Mittal said.
The Solana developer ecosystem will now have easier access to historical data thanks to Google Cloud's announcement that it has begun indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse. The feature will go live in the first quarter of 2023, according to Mittal.
According to Mittal, Google Cloud will offer up to $100,000 in Cloud Credits through its credits program to "select startups in the Solana ecosystem."
Though Solana reached an all-time high of $260 in November, it has since fallen precipitously due to frequent consensus failures on nodes. Thus, Google's engagement with Solana provides investors faith that the price will continue to rise to new highs, prompting Solana founder Anatoly Yakonevo to call Google's move "a pretty big lift."
When asked where Google can help with "hard engineering problems," Yakovenko mentioned improving SDKs to help speed up application development and tackling the "unsolved problem" of storing seed phrases.
"There's been a bunch of research done on effectively storing secrets in a way that Google doesn't even know the secrets, and you have partial recovery of the keys between the user and a service provider like Google that can verify your identity," he said.
On Oct. 11, Google Cloud and Coinbase also announced a "new, long-term strategic partnership to better serve the growing Web3 ecosystem and its developers."
According to them, this agreement will "involve Coinbase selecting Google Cloud as a strategic cloud provider to build advanced exchange and data services."
Coinbase would handle blockchain data at scale on Google Cloud's strong compute platform, and it would expand the worldwide reach of its crypto services by leveraging Google's premium fiber-optic network.
Coinbase will also "build its global data platform on Google Cloud's secure infrastructure and leverage their leading data and analytics technologies to provide Coinbase customers with machine learning-driven crypto insights," according to the news announcement.
