Google Cloud gets into the web3 act with managed blockchain node service • TechCrunch

Five years ago, blockchain was booming in the enterprise, or so many companies led us to believe. Back then, companies like SAP and IBM tried to build blockchain practices, but while the technology sounded great to solve countless problems in the enterprise, it never really took off.

Fast forward to 2022 and the blockchain comes under a new guise with the name web3 as an umbrella term and lots of VC money behind it. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cloud platform companies want to get down to business.

To that end, Google Cloud announced today that it is launching the Blockchain Node Engine, which it bills as “a fully managed node hosting for web3 development.” Earlier this year, the company announced that it was launching a new team dedicated to digital assets, and this tool is part of what has come out of the team’s work.

In a blog post announcing the new service from Amit Zavery, GM and VP of engineering and platform and James Tromans, director of cloud web3, the two wrote that blockchain nodes must work hard and constantly exchange the latest blockchain data, so that all nodes remain in sync. It is a data- and resource-intensive process.

Google Cloud hopes to make that easier by providing a managed service to handle node creation, while providing a secure development environment in a fully managed product. From Google’s perspective, it’s much easier to let them do the heavy lifting while you concentrate on building your web3 application.

In the couple’s own words, “While self-managed nodes are often difficult to deploy and require constant administration, the Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node hosting service that minimizes the need for node operations. web3 companies that need dedicated nodes can forward transactions, deploy smart contracts, and read or write blockchain data with the reliability, performance and security they expect from Google Cloud computing and network infrastructure,” they wrote in the post.

These are bolter things, which help companies set up a node on supported blockchains and then manage it for the user, so they don’t have to worry about all the management costs involved. First, the company will support the Ethereum blockchain, so developers deploying nodes on Ethereum can do it themselves or pay Google to do much of that work for them. Presumably there will be other supported blockchains in the future.

While it may feel like a pure crypto game, Tromans says the service is ultimately agnostic and developers can build anything they want. “We’re building foundational primitives to help developers innovate faster. Accordingly, the Blockchain Node Engine is focused on [multiple] developer use cases: smart contract development, reading from and writing to the blockchain, etc. How different developers use their fully managed, dedicated blockchain node engine infrastructure will depend on their individual use cases,” Tromans told TechCrunch.

The product is available from today in private preview.