In a blog post on September 21, Google Cloud’s BigQuery service announced the addition of 11 blockchain networks to its data repository. The newly added networks include Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum’s Görli testnet, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon’s mainnet, Polygon’s Mumbai testnet, and Tron.
BigQuery is Google’s data warehousing service, which allows enterprise companies to store their data and perform queries on that data. It also offers access to various public datasets that can be queried, such as Google Trends, U.S. Census data, Google Analytics, and more.
Back in 2018, Google introduced Bitcoin as part of its data offerings, and later in the same year, Ethereum was added. Google continued to expand its blockchain coverage in February 2019 by including Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Zcash. The September 21 announcement means that BigQuery now encompasses data from a total of 19 blockchain networks.
In addition to the inclusion of these new blockchains, Google has implemented a new feature to make querying blockchain data easier. Through a set of user-defined functions, the team has provided methods to handle the long decimal results often found in blockchain data. Google stated in its blog post that these new features will “provide customers with access to longer decimal digits for their blockchain data and reduce rounding errors in computations.”
Google Cloud has shown an increasing interest in blockchain technology in 2023. On July 7, it partnered with Volt, an infrastructure provider for the Lightning Network. It also collaborated with the Web3 startup Orderly Network on September 14 to facilitate the provision of off-chain components for decentralized finance.
This growing involvement in blockchain technology signifies Google’s commitment to harnessing the potential of blockchain and expanding its data services in this space.