Published
5 years ago on
September 05, 2018
The search giant's recent rollout of Ethereum analytics tool BigQuery shows that the Alphabet subsidiary (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking the blockchain as seriously as it does cloud rivals Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). It's probably a bold move: Google is the most disruptive company of the 2000s and blockchain and digital currencies are among the most disruptive inventions in decades. BigQuery lets users analyze massive datasets — up to billions of rows — on the Ethereum blockchain by enabling SQL queries. Because such queries leverage the search engine's infrastructure, they can be completed extremely fast. The free tool lets users access analytics and visualizations of aggregate data, leading to the discovery of valuable information about the Ethereum network such as average transaction costs, transaction times, network usage and smart contract analytics, to name a few. BigQuery Use Cases For example, here's a query showing the 10 most popular ERC-721 contracts, by number of transactions. And here's a visualization of Ether transfers and transaction costs for 2018. Aside from BigQuery, the Ethereum blockchain dataset is also available on Kaggle’s no charge in-browser coding environment. Better Decision-Making So why is the Silicon Valley company making blockchain data available on the cloud? It signals to blockchain developers and services that they might want to work with Google Cloud in the future — and not necessarily Amazon and Microsoft, both of which are developing blockchain tools and services. Google's team said in an Aug. 29 blog that "[BigQuery] is useful for making business decisions, such as prioritizing improvements to the Ethereum architecture itself … to balance sheet adjustments (how quickly can a wallet be rebalanced?)." According to the same blog, the team built a software system on its Cloud platform that (1) synchronizes the Ethereum blockchain to computers running Parity in Google Cloud, (2) performs a daily extraction of data from the Ethereum blockchain ledger, including the results of smart contract transactions, such as token transfers, and (3) de-normalizes and stores date-partitioned data to BigQuery for easy and cost-effective exploration. Google Expands Blockchain Offerings Earlier this year, Google made Bitcoin's dataset available on BigQuery. In July, the company partnered with distributed ledger technology (DLT) provider Digital Asset to make its blockchain platform and developer tools available on Google Cloud. "We’re partnering with Google Cloud to provide developers with a full stack solution so they can unleash the potential for web-paced innovation in blockchain," said Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset in a July 23 statement. "This will reduce the technical barriers to DLT application development by delivering our advanced distributed ledger platform and modelling language to Google Cloud." "[Distributed ledger technology] has great potential to benefit customers not just in the financial services industry, but across many industries, and we’re excited to bring these developer tools to Google Cloud," said Leonard Law, Head of Financial Services Platform at Google Cloud. The blockchain has been hailed as an innovation that enables distributed protocols and decentralized organization. But the entrance of Google, Amazon and Microsoft brings into question whether some centralization is helpful to users and stakeholders. Whatever the case may be, Google's blockchain offerings bring credibility and legitimacy to an important and disruptive innovation.
