Google

From CryptoWiki

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

"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"

"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"

"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."

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

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

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).
  • Stellar; big donor

Partnerships

"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."