Google veteran engineering Vice President Shivakumar Venkataraman has been appointed to head up a Google specialist team which will be exploring blockchain opportunities for Google. Bloomberg claims to have seen an email in which the new team will be charged with investigating:
blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies
Google recently hired a new head of payments, Arnold Goldberg, a move which was announced as part of Google shifting to become more involved in financial services and cryptocurrency, after Google Pay has lagged behind Apple Pay. Google has made clear it has no intentions to become a bank, but rather wants to be providing the connectivity between businesses involved in payments and banking.
With their incredible cloud computing reach, Google is well placed to bring private chain smart-contracts-as-a-service and blockchain-as-a-service and potentially node operations for public blockchains, as well as a mainstreaming of crypto and blockchain simply by virtue of being involved in the space.
2022 definitely seems to be the year for crypto and blockchain to go mainstream, if Google's moves are anything to go by.