On Saturday, the cloud computing division of Google, known as Google Cloud, made the announcement that it is now operating a validator on the Solana blockchain. In the near future, the company plans to add features that are designed to welcome Solana developers and node runners.
As a result of the news, the price of Solana (SOL) increased by 14%, and they were trading at around $36.81 at the time of publication, But will Solana see more rising in the coming days?
Google Becomes Solana Validator
In a thread on Twitter, Google Cloud said that it plans to add its Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain in 2023. This is in addition to running a Solana validator “to participate in and validate the network.” This news comes on the heels of the company’s announcement that it will be running a Solana validator. A “fully managed node hosting service” that already supports the Ethereum blockchain is offered by the provider under the name Blockchain Node Engine.
At the Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal stated that the company’s goal is to “make it possible to run a Solana node in a cost-effective manner with just one click.”
Because Google Cloud is now indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse, the Solana developer ecosystem will have “easier access to historical data.” According to Mittal, the functionality will become available during the first quarter of 2023.
Mittal also said that Google Cloud would be expanding its credits program to “select startups in the Solana ecosystem” and that successful applicants could get up to $100,000 in Cloud Credits.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, said that the decision by Google to add Solana to BigQuery was “a pretty big lift.” He said this while speaking onstage at Breakpoint.
When asked where Google can help with “hard engineering problems,” Yakovenko mentioned improving SDKs to help speed up the development of applications and addressing the “unsolved problem” of storing seed phrases as two areas where Google can lend a hand.
“There has been a lot 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. “This is something that Google doesn’t even know how to do.”
