Google

Basics

• Uses technology built by Parity, according to their website.

History

• "Google—as the now familiar story goes—started out as a research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students at Stanford University. Unsurprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep to find the connection to the Defense Department. DARPA—the current name of the oft-rebranded ARPA—was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement sponsors of the “Stanford Digital Libraries Project,” which helped fund Page and Brin’s research. DARPA was even thanked by name in the white paper where the idea for Google was first laid out: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”"
• From the same document: "In 2010, details of a formal NSA-Google relationship began to emerge, but both parties refused to divulge any further information about the relationship. Subsequent reporting suggested that Google had “agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers.” More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”"

Projects

• From Forbes Blockchain 50 (Apr 16, 2019):

"The search giant has made numerous investments in blockchain, including Veem, a payments startup that lets enterprises instantly send and receive payments in different currencies, using bitcoin as an intermediary holding. Meanwhile, it has created a suite of tools that make it easier to search (and analyze) cryptocurrency transactions—in other words, to Google public blockchains. Full profile"

• From Forbes Blockchain 50 (19-2-2020):

"In June, the search giant announced that it was integrating its BigQuery data analytics platform with Chainlink, allowing data from outside sources to be used in applications built directly on the blockchain. The partnership could help process futures contracts, settle speculative bets and make transactions more private. Earlier in 2019, Google launched a suite of tools on BigQuery that made blockchain data for bitcoin and seven other major cryptocurrencies fully searchable."

• It has announced it will work on/with Chainlink, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Zcash, Dogecoin, Dash
• Google announced an integration with Chainlink to develop middleware in order to connect Ethereum to its enterprise cloud data warehouse. Through a Chainlink oracle, a smart contract can fetch data from an on-chain query to a data warehouse like Google’s BigQuery.
• "Google is moving into crypto, just in a different direction than other big tech firms; while others, like Amazon or Microsoft, focus on blockchain applications, Google is working on data analysis, quantification, and user experience; the project is a subset of Google Cloud and is harnessing big data and application program interfaces (API) to search blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just like Google Search in the early days of the internet, Google is using its 'BigQuery' system for generalized searches across blockchains. BigQuery is growing and hoping to add altcoins like Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, and more"

• From Proof of Work #77 (23-10-2019):

"Announced a new platform, FOAM In-Sight in collaboration with FOAM, Google Cloud Platform, Blocklytics and Chainlink for a hybrid cloud/blockchain application with a demo for DevConV. Main-net next."

• DOS is a Google Cloud partner in their program (8-1-2021).

Nodes

• Google Cloud has announced (23-2-2023) a partnership with blockchain company Tezos to become a block validator (“baker”) in its network. As part of this partnership, Google Cloud will also offer Tezos validation services through its platform.
• From Decrypt (9-2-2023):

"By November Aptos had inked a partnership with Google Cloud. The company’s also running a validator on the Aptos network."

• Partnered with Flow (14-9-2021):

"Through the multi-year partnership, Google Cloud will act as a network operator, offering its infrastructure to help Flow scale."

• Google Cloud is a node operator for EOS, Hedera and Theta (7-10-2020). Added Solana (5-11-2022).

People on Google positions

• Eric Schmidt; the former CEO of Google and current technical advisor to Google parent company Alphabet, is now the chairman of the Pentagon’s “Defense Innovation Board,” which seeks to bring the efficiency and vision of Silicon Valley to the Defense Department’s high-tech innovation initiatives.
• Hitters Xu; former Director of Ant Financial's Blockchain Platform (Alibaba’s financial arm) and part of Google's Search & Anti-Fraud team.
• Jehan Chu is a Google EYE Program Mentor
• Marcos Cunha; recently served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Capital Factory/Google/Code2040 and as a Google Developers Expert for Growth. Marcos is an advisor to various companies and a mentor at Google's Pioneer Accelerator and University of Texas Longhorn Startup Lab. He is also Director of WanLabs Americas
• Allen Day, science advocate and key leader at Google in blockchain according to Forbes. Still as of 19-2-2020.
• Alex Cheng; director (according (as of 1-2020) to Loopring)

Former employees

• Mike Belshe worked at Google on the founding team of Google Chrome
• Charlie Lee came from Google where he had a tech job
• Ben Davenport worked in engineering at Google
• Badros, Greg; Advisor to BAT, Angel Investor; previously: Facebook, Google
• Jonathan Teo, BitFury Board of Advisors, led Google’s International R&D department
• Mike Hearn
• One or more are now working (together with) TrueUSD
• Mike Blandina; held senior engineering roles now at Bakkt
• The ex-director of DARPA, Regina Dugan, was hired by Google in 2012 to head its Advanced Technology and Projects group, and that she was then hired by Facebook in 2016 to head their “Building 8” research group focusing on experimental technologies like brain sensors and artificial intelligence. 
• Some of the team members of Solana used to work here 
• IOST claims to have team members who (among many other big name places) come from here. 
• Steve Lee; former product director, now team leader at Square Crypto
• Jeffrey Czyz; Google alum, now works for Square Crypto 
• Surojit Chatterjee; formerly 11 years at Google, as VP, now Chief Product Officer at Coinbase.
• Centrality claims their team members come from (10-4-2020) all kinds of big organisations, one of which is Alibaba.
• Gary Wang; was a software engineer at Google prior to founding Alameda and FTX.
• Elrond has a team member coming from this company.
• NEAR has engineers coming from here.
• Illia Polosukhin; used to work for Google on of their biggest open source projects before starting NEAR.
• Is among the slew of big names mentioned (12-6-2020) as previous experience on the CertiK team page.
• Coinbase has hired executives from Google
• Arpit Agarwal; former emplyee, now Matic and DeFiDollar (6-9-2020).
• Evgeny Yurtaev; previously worked at Google as a software engineer. 
• Oasis Network; CMC claims on that some of the team members come from here (15-11-2020). 
• Mike Dudas; claims to have worked at Google Wallet (4-2-2021).
• Nader Al-Naji; former engineer, now rumoured founder of BitClout (27-3-2021).

Investments

• Basis; part of the $130M raise into Nader Al-Naji's project, it failed a couple months later and he returned the money.
• Blockchain.info raised 40 million in funding in 6-2017 led by the firms Lakestar and GV (formerly Google Ventures. In a new raise of $120M GV participated once more (2-2-2021).
• Decent received a $10k grant from Google Grants
• Helium; GV bought equity according to the Helium website (11-12-2020).
• Got mentioned as one of the creditors of FTX (26-1-2023).
• Stellar; big donor

Partnerships

• Google Cloud became one of the trusted companies to store tx for Arbitrum Nova (15-3-2023).
• Google Cloud partnered with NEAR (10-2022):

"In October, NEAR announced a partnership with Google Cloud, which will provide technical support for all NEAR grant recipients. Google Cloud will provide the necessary infrastructure for NEAR’s Remote Procedure Call (RPC) node provider to Pagoda, a Web3 startup platform developed by NEAR. Pagoda provides developers with a library of pre-audited templates and auto-generated contract user interfaces, which makes it easy to launch applications on the NEAR blockchain."

• Google Cloud Partner is mentioned as a partner on Ontology's website (2-11-2020).
• From this article (28-5-2020):

"Google has joined the grandly-named Enterprise Validator Program, alongside Binance, Blockchain Ventures, and Gumi, which ‘allows enterprises to validate transactions in accordance with Theta’s underlying consensus protocol’, in its own words."

• A partnership (2-2020) between Hedera Hashgraph and Google Cloud pumped HBAR more than 50 percent.
• Is listed as a partner on the website of Cypherium (as of 9-2019)