Google ’s parent company, Alphabet, has no plans to be left behind in the race for Web3.- CEO
Sundar Pichai explained that Google’s Cloud team is looking at how new products can be deployed on block-based platforms. - Pichai’s comments come less than a month after reports of Google forming a team dedicated to blockchain and its related technologies.
Google’s interest spans from augmented reality (AR) to the cloud. And, not unlike Facebook, it’s hoping that AR will find use cases within applications like Maps,
In the week before the earnings call, Richard Widmann, head of strategy for digital assets at Google’s Cloud division had announced plans to hire people with block chain expertise, “We think that if we do our jobs right, it will drive decentralization,” Widmann said at the time.
Last month, Google had reportedly formed a blockchain group under Shivakumar Venkataraman to focus on “blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies.”
According to data compiled by Ark Invest, an investment management firm, the Web3 and the metaverse are a $1 trillion dollar opportunity, explaining the pivot by the largest tech firms.
Jack Dorsey’s Square and Mark Zuckerberg-owned Facebook rebranded to Block and Meta, respectively. Meanwhile, Amazon had launched its Managed Blockchain service back in 2018. Even Microsoft introduced its Azure Blockchain Service in 2019 but it’s another story that it had to shut it down in 2021.
However, it should be noted that backing blockchain technology and Web3 are two very different things. Dorsey, for instance, touts himself to be a Bitcoin maximalist but, when it comes to Web3, has very strong opinions on whether such a construct can exist given the agenda of venture capitalists.
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