Google’s cloud computing division announced on Saturday that it is now running a validator node on the Solana blockchain and in coming months, it is going to add more features to it.
In a Twitter thread, the tech major said that it also plans to add the Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain in 2023.
For the uninitiated, a Blockchain Node Engine (BNE) is a fully managed node-hosting service that minimizes the quantum of work needed to become a validator of any network. Google Cloud will wholly manage, monitor, and maintain the operations of BNE. You can learn more about BNE here.
For context, Google Cloud’s BNE already supports the Ethereum blockchain.
At Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal said that they want to make BNE a one-click system to run a Solana or any other node in a cost-effective way.
The firm also announced that it has started indexing Solana data and is adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse. It will help developers on Solana’s blockchain to access historical data and the feature will be made available to developers in the first quarter of 2023.
A shot in the arm for Solana
Solana’s founder Anatoly Yakovenko welcomed the initiative, hoping that it will provide a big push to the development of the Solana blockchain. He said that Google can help with “hard engineering problems” and build better software development kits (SDKs) to speed up the development of applications and address the unsolved problems of storing seed phrases.
At the Lisbon conference, Yakovenko said, “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.”
Following the announcement, Solana’s native token SOL spiked by up to 12%, hitting a high of $38.55 before the sell-off.
On a different note, Solana’s mobile team said that the pre-orders for the upcoming Solana smartphones will commence in 2023. However, the company is yet to issue an official date for the start of its deliveries.
