Google Cloud Joins Hedera Governing Council, Node Operator

Google Cloud announced it will serve as a member of Hedera’s Governing Council, alongside other notable companies such as IBM and Boeing. Google Cloud will also act in a technical capacity, operating a Hedera network node and integrating Hedera’s ledger data with its own public datasets.

Google Cloud has revealed that it is working closely with Hedera Hashgraph, according to an announcement published by the division on Tuesday, Feb. 11.

According to Allen Day, developer advocate at Google Cloud, Hedera has been using the Google Cloud Platform internally since it began to develop its distributed ledger platform. But, from this point on, Hedera will use GCP as its preferred cloud services provider. Day explains:

“Hedera [has selected] Google Cloud as a preferred cloud provider for its public testnets and Hedera Consensus Service ecosystem. Thanks to the extensive geographical coverage of Google’s network, [developers] can ensure both access and performance of their applications no matter where they are in the world.”

Hedera’s goals are similar to those of many other blockchain startups. It mainly aims to serve as a decentralized payment network. To accomplish this, Hedera uses several blockchain-related technologies, including BFT consensus, mining, and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs).

But despite Hedera’s strong technical features, its market prospects are uncertain. Last fall, many critics drew attention to the fact that Hedera’s HBAR token was quickly losing value.

For the time being, the new alliance with Google seems to have boosted HBAR’s market value. The token’s price rose above $0.03 today, pushing HBAR’s market cap to $100 million. This makes Hedera the 59th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization today.

However, HBAR’s price has been increasing gradually since the beginning of February. Some growth may be due to the fact that Hedera is adding new features and making deliberate economic adjustments.

Today’s news is a reminder that Google has been moving into blockchain slowly but surely. Last October, Google Cloud integrated its BigQuery datasets with Chainlink’s blockchain oracles. Google Cloud also introduced several cryptocurrencies to its datasets in February 2019.

Google Cloud’s blockchain strategy seems to be different from the direction taken by other big tech companies. Whereas Microsoft and Amazon are primarily providing blockchain-as-a-service, Google Cloud appears to be focused on blockchain’s potential within data analytics.

However, Google has not yet acquired a blockchain company or offered its own competing blockchain service—and it has said very little about that possibility.

On the other hand, Google and its parent company Alphabet have invested in several blockchain and DeFi startups. In recent years, Google has provided backing for the settlement network Ripple, the derivatives exchange LedgerX, and the crypto-integrated money transfer platform Veem.

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