Google Forms Web3 Team to Tap the Market's 'Tremendous Potential'

By Stacy Elliott

Well, that didn’t take long. Three months after Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said it was actively looking into Web3, its cloud computing unit has formed a team.

Amit Zavery, a vice president at Google Cloud, told employees in an email Friday viewed by CNBC that the idea is to make the company’s cloud platform the preferred choice among developers. 

“While the world is still early in its embrace of Web3, it is a market that is already demonstrating tremendous potential with many customers asking us to increase our support for Web3 and Crypto related technologies,” he wrote.

Web3 refers to the next generation of internet applications that focus on decentralization, which would allow users to retain control of more of their data.

The Google team will work on back-end services for developers creating Web3 applications, according to the email.

During Alphabet’s 2021 Q4 earnings call in February, CEO Sundar Pichai said the Google Cloud team would be just one way that the company positions its businesses to compete in blockchain technology.

“On Web3, we are definitely looking at blockchain and such an interesting and powerful technology with broad applications, so much broader again in any one application. So as a company, we are looking at how we might contribute to the ecosystem and add value,” Pichai said during the call, answering a question from JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth. “Just one example, our Cloud team is looking at how they can support our customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms.”

The company has been considering how it fits into the crypto space for a while now. 

Back in January, Google hired Arnold Goldberg, a former chief product architect at PayPal, to lead its payments division. He was still with the payments company when it announced that customers would be able to use their accounts to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum.  

“Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” Google President of Commerce Bill Ready told Bloomberg in January. “As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.”

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