Google Cloud Just Became a Solana Validator

Google’s cloud computing division Google Cloud announced on Saturday that it’s now running a validator on the Solana blockchain, and will soon add features aimed at welcoming Solana developers and node runners.

Solana ( SOL) rose 12% on the news, changing hands at around $36.80 at time of publication.

In a Twitter thread, Google Cloud revealed that as well as running a Solana validator “to participate in and validate the network,” it is planning to bring its Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain in 2023. The Blockchain Node Engine is a “fully-managed node hosting service” run by the provider, which already supports the Ethereum blockchain.

“We want to make it one-click to run a Solana node in a cost-effective way,” said Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Lisbon.

Google Cloud also announced it’s now indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse, a move that will “make it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data.” The feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023, Mittal said.

Mittal added that Google Cloud is bringing its credits program to “select startups in the Solana ecosystem” with up to $100,000 in Cloud Credits available for applicants.

Onstage at Breakpoint, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko hailed the “pretty big lift from Google” in adding Solana to BigQuery. 

When asked where Google can assist with “hard engineering problems,” Yakovenko cited building better SDKs to help speed up the development of applications, and addressing the “unsolved problem” of storing seed phrases.

“There’s been a bunch of research done on effectively storing secrets in a way that Google doesn’t even know the secrets, and you have partial recovery of the keys between the user and a service provider like Google that can verify your identity,” he said.