According to CoinDesk, Google Cloud is expanding its push into blockchain by adding 11 networks, including Polygon, Optimism, and Polkadot, to its BigQuery program for public datasets. The company first announced the availability of Bitcoin blockchain data for exploration through the program in February 2018 and has since added 10 more networks, such as Ethereum, Litecoin, and Dogecoin. BigQuery is a serverless and cost-effective enterprise data warehouse designed for practitioners with various coding skills.
A key advantage of the program, according to Google Cloud, is that users may be able to retrieve historical data from an off-chain provider faster than querying the blockchain directly. The expansion comes as Google Cloud continues to invest in blockchain despite the ongoing 'crypto winter' market downturn. James Tromans, global head of Web3 at Google Cloud, stated that the company has been growing its business development, go-to-market teams, product, and engineering capabilities in the space over the past 18 months.
Other blockchains recently added to the BigQuery program include Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum's Goerli test network, Fantom Opera, NEAR, and Tron. Google Cloud also plans to improve the Bitcoin BigQuery dataset by adding support for the Ordinals project, which gained popularity earlier this year as a way to generate NFTs on the largest and original blockchain network. The program makes historical blockchain data available for exploration, overcoming the limited capability of the underlying network for short time-scale reporting on specific or aggregated money flows stored in the ledger. The expansion to include more blockchains allows for multi-chain meta-analyses and integration with conventional financial record processing systems. Blockchain foundations, Web3 analytics firms, developers, and customers are demanding a more comprehensive view across the crypto landscape and the ability to query more chains. Data queries may focus on the number of NFTs minted across specific blockchains, fee comparisons between networks, or the number of active wallets on chains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) programming environment.
