Google Finally Embraces Blockchain To Fight Cloud Data Traffic Congestions

After burying publications affiliated with blockchain firms, and banning cryptocurrency-related ads, Google has finally come at peace with distributed ledger technology. 

The internet mountain behind Google, Alphabet Inc. recently alligned forces with Theta Labs, a privately funded company that aims to utilize Google Cloud in order to offer blockchain services and solutions, similar to AliCloud‘s blockchain services and IBM’s arsenal of Hyperledger blockchain solutions.

More specifically, Google’s Cloud Infrastructure will enable global users to deploy and utilize Theta Labs’ blockchain nodes. Furthermore, Google Cloud itself will act as a transactions validator for Theta’s distributed network starting from the European region.

You might be thinking out loud this is far from enough to claim Google has tapped into distributed ledger technology, yet considering its past relation with blockchain and digital currencies, one could say it’s a big leap towards a global distributed network of data, assets, and digital economies.

Read More: CBDC Are Not Keen On The Benefits Of Decentralization, But Rather About Centralizing It

“This is one of our first validators, but we have many crypto customers…we had already made Bitcoin, Ethereum and six other cryptocurrencies’ data available through our public dataset program. This is the next step.” said Allen Day, dev Advocate for Google commenting on the partnership.

In a nutshell, being a validator means deciding whether a transaction should be promoted or not into the next block to be minted, and it is an essential component of decentralized networks. 

As for Theta Labs, the California-based venture aims to relieve bottlenecks related to internet traffic congestion, offering decentralized storage, computing resources, and data transaction times missing from online video distributors, streaming platforms, and other business models stampped with “large-files”, and “real-time”.

Basically, video distributors such as Netflix, Amazon, and Alphabet’s own YouTube rely on centralized data centers, offering the requested data, in this case a video, everytime a customer attempts to watch the respective video. Considering that every pull request should be met with a unique data provision.

What Theta Labs and Google are working on will allow your neighbor use your already downloaded data in case he plans to watch the same movie you have watched or possibly started to watch in a relatively close timeframe and vise versa. 

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That way, the movie data will be provided by the centralized server once, and then distributed among the nodes to meet customers’ demands. Google will make sure anyone who’s eligible to access the already downloaded data could have instant access to it, and ofcourse since we’re talking about blockchain technology, authentication protocols, tracking history, as well as ownership cotnracts make the whole thing a walk in the park. 

The only thing that puts me in thoughts is the fact that Theta Labs utilizes Ethereum’s ERC-20 Token Standard for their native network’s token, which is set to a fixed supply of 1 billion units. I’d expect a titan of the likes of Google to consider some enterprise-grade blockchain providers such as R3’s Corda, or IBM’s Hyperledger for the use-case. 

Nevertheless, it is an exciting project, and if Google being involved with blockchain is put aside, it would be really awsome to see 4k, and even 8k streams without any hustle whatsoever. 

What are your thoughts on the matter? Let me know in the comments section below or hit me on Twitter.