​Google Cloud becomes a Polygon blockchain partner

Google Cloud is working with Polygon Labs to help developers make it easier to build, launch and grow their Web3 products and decentralized applications (dapps) on the Ethereum-based layer 2 blockchain.

Under the new partnership, Google Cloud will bring its Blockchain Node Engine - the tech giant's fully managed node hosting service - to the Polygon ecosystem, which will help developers focus on building on the protocol, while retaining complete control over where nodes are deployed, the company said in a statement issued during Consensus 2023 in Austin, Texas.

“Today's announcement with Google Cloud aims to increase transaction throughput enabling use cases in gaming, supply chain management, and DeFi," Polygon President Ryan Wyatt said in the statement, adding: "This will pave the way for even more businesses to embrace blockchain technology through Polygon."

Google, a Web2 powerhouse, has been actively pushing further into the Web3 world in recent years by making more of its technical expertise available to developers to build projects. Most recently, it launched a “Google for Startups Cloud Program” that will provide support for startups and emerging projects in the Web3 industry to scale their projects faster and more securely. Also, earlier this month, the Celo Foundation said that it was working with Google Cloud to offer workshops and cloud computing services to developers and Web3 founders building on Celo.

The tech powerhouse said that its partnership with Polygon will also help the protocol advance its zero-knowledge innovation strategy, potentially making transactions cheaper and faster. "Initial tests to run Polygon zkEVM’s zero-knowledge proofs on Google Cloud, for instance, resulted in significantly faster and cheaper transactions as compared to the existing setup," the statement said. Polygon released its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta to the public last month.

"Google Cloud is helping the industry achieve escape velocity by directing our engineering efforts toward areas like improving data availability and enhancing the resilience and performance of scaling protocols like zero-knowledge proofs,” Mitesh Agarwal, managing director, customer engineering and Web3 go-to-market, Asia Pacific of Google Cloud said in the statement.