Google Cloud announced on Thursday an expansive partnership with Polygon Labs, which develops software for and supports the Polygon ecosystem of blockchains.
As part of the tie-up, the cloud computing giant will add support for Polygon, a collection of layer 2 blockchains built on top of Ethereum, to its Blockchain Node Engine. Currently, the Blockchain Node Engine, a streamlined means for developers to access and use blockchains on Google’s servers, only supports Ethereum and Solana.
Moreover, Google Cloud will build out infrastructure to support Polygon zkEVM, a new blockchain within the Polygon ecosystem recently released to much fanfare, and by the end of the third quarter, it will also help developers deploy application-specific blockchains built with Polygon tech on its servers.
“Google Cloud supporting all of the Polygon protocols is a step in the right direction to help onboard more people into Web3," Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, said in a statement.
And finally, Google’s cloud computing arm will provide startups backed by Polygon Ventures—a fund that invests in businesses building on Polygon—with a number of benefits, including credits to spend on hosting software on Google Cloud’s servers and access to the cloud services provider’s newly announced Web3 startup program. In fact, Google Cloud had already announced on Tuesday that successful applicants to the Web3 startup program are eligible to access a pot of $3 million in dedicated funding from the Polygon Ventures Ecosystem Fund, among other perks.
“The industry is experiencing a flight to quality as corporations seek to minimize risk when exploring new possibilities in Web3,” Mitesh Agarwal, a managing director at Google Cloud, said in a statement.
Despite the ongoing chill of Crypto Winter and a regulatory crackdown from the U.S. government, Google Cloud’s tie-up with Polygon Labs is further evidence of the cloud computing giant’s accelerating flurry of attention to Web3 from late 2022 through 2023.
In the first half of 2022, Google Cloud announced the formation of its digital assets and Web3 engineering teams. Then, after a ramp-up period, it began a steady campaign as it partnered with labs and foundations to support a number of blockchains, including BNB Chain, Solana, Aptos, Tezos, Casper, and Celo.
Google Cloud’s partnership with Polygon Labs, however, is more extensive than many of its prior affiliations with blockchain protocols. Its support for Celo, for example, boiled down to an extension of its existing Google for Startups Cloud Program to the blockchain's developers. While the cloud computing giant is extending similar benefits to Polygon developers, it’s also tailoring its infrastructure to Polygon’s ecosystem, which has recently claimed a large number of brand-name clients, including Starbucks and Mastercard.
