Google Cloud said on Tuesday that it will partner with Casper Labs, the company that develops and maintains the Casper blockchain, which serves large companies and government institutions.
As part of the partnership, Casper Labs will move part of its infrastructure to Google Cloud servers as well as provide developers working on the Casper blockchain access to the cloud provider’s storage and hosting space.
“This collaboration just helps ensure that we’re making things that are truly accessible to people who want to use this technology but can’t figure out how,” said Mrinal Manohar, founder and CEO of Casper Labs. fortune.
The addition of Casper Labs, which launched Casper in March 2021, to its growing list of blockchain partnerships is the latest in a series of moves by Google to increase its Web3 presence as it competes with Amazon Web Services, which also announced its own partnership. with labs and blockchain foundations. Google Cloud’s tie-up with Casper Labs could also be an effort to diversify Web3’s portfolio, as Casper markets its technology to large businesses and government agencies.
Manohar speculates that Casper’s focus on larger institutions, which are “sticky long-term customers,” is attractive to Google Cloud. A Google cloud computing spokesperson declined to elaborate on why it chose Casper but pointed to a statement from James Tromans, director of Web3 engineering at Google Cloud, who said that through his work with Casper Labs, Google Cloud “is able to provide secure, reliable, and sustainable cloud infrastructure for developers .
Unlike other blockchains, Casper has a mix of add-ons that make it a great organization, Manohar said. This includes the use of existing programming languages, not languages developed specifically for blockchains, as well as the ability for users to mix private blockchains with public chains. (This feature is especially important, he says, when handling sensitive information, such as Social Security ID numbers.)
While Manohar says he can’t reveal all of Casper Labs’ customers, he points to his partnership with IPwe, a patent business, as an example.
Google Cloud’s collaboration with Casper Labs is the latest public step into the Web3 world. In the first half of 2022, announced the creation of digital assets and the Web3 team. In the fall of 2022, it launched one of its first offerings, a partnership with Coinbase to allow some Google Cloud customers to pay for server space with cryptocurrency. It then launched the Blockchain Node Engine, a simple tool for developers to access and use the blockchain on Google’s servers.
Google Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine currently only supports Ethereum, and will support Solana in the future, a spokesperson said. At the same time, the cloud computing giant is collaborating with other blockchain and blockchain developers, including Aptos and BNB Chain, in various ways. Just last week, before announcing the Casper Labs tie-up, Google Cloud said it would partner with the Tezos Foundation, which supports the use and development of the Tezos blockchain.
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