Google is the latest tech giant to offer blockchain technology to its customers. The company announced that it would be introducing open-source integrations for applications built with both Ethereum and Hyperledger later this year through its Google Cloud Product marketplace.
Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, executive director of Hyperledger Brian Behlendorf explains, “This decision follows a similar path taken by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and cloud-hosting services offered by Oracle, Huawei and IBM to offer ready-made templates for their ‘blockchain as a service’ offerings. There is growing interest in blockchain enterprise development options. This is one of the kinds of services offered by more than 60 companies participating in the Hyperledger Vendor Directory.”
Google has allegedly held an interest in blockchain technology for years and was the most active investor in blockchain startups and applications between 2012 and 2017, after Japan’s SBI Holdings.
According to Behlendorf, the search engine’s interest in Hyperledger is due in part to its latest project entitled “Hyperledger Fabric.” He states that Fabric is a leading enterprise blockchain platform that runs dozens of production enterprise networks across finance, healthcare and supply chain applications. It also has hundreds of pilots in operation.
“Unlike other systems, it has support for writing business logic (what you might call ‘smart contracts’) in Go, JavaScript, and soon Java,” he explains. “It has also been fine-tuned to operate in environments where performance (time to finality, combined with the number of transactions per second) are optimized.”
Behlendorf is confident Hyperledger can bring a lot to the table and offer Google’s customers access to an array of new tools and products they never even knew existed.
“We hope Google finds Hyperledger Fabric and other related technologies to be capable and easy-to-support options for its customers to build and operate enterprise blockchain networks and applications,” he says.
“As it is open-source, and all development is done publicly, we think Google will benefit from the high velocity of development on Fabric by the broad and active user and developer community. Hopefully, they’ll find bugs and help us fix them! That will help them provide a better offering than any proprietary or in-house alternative might. For us, the potential for more developer contributions — and maybe another logo to add to our vendor directory — will be really helpful.”
Founded in December 2015, Hyperledger is a vendor-neutral home for the collaborative and open-source development of blockchain technology platforms and tools. As a “coin agnostic” system, it does not require a specific token or currency to operate and is not funded by initial coin offerings (ICOs). The company boasts over 250 members in its consortium and uses this technology to build products and services for both internal and resale purposes.