Google Cloud said on Tuesday that it will partner with Casper Labs, the company that develops and maintains the Casper blockchain, which caters to large corporations and government institutions.
As part of the partnership, Casper Labs will move a portion of its infrastructure over to Google Cloud’s servers as well as provide developers working on the Casper blockchain access to the cloud provider’s storage and hosting space.
“This collaboration just really helps ensure that we’re making things just really accessible to people who want to use this technology but can’t just figure out how,” Mrinal Manohar, cofounder and CEO of Casper Labs, told Fortune.
The addition of Casper Labs, which launched Casper in March 2021, to its growing roster of blockchain partnerships is the latest in a series of moves by Google to increase its Web3 presence as it competes with Amazon Web Services, which is also announcing its own partnerships with blockchain labs and foundations. Google Cloud’s tie-up with Casper Labs is also potentially an attempt to diversify its Web3 portfolio, as Casper markets its technology to large businesses and government agencies.
Manohar speculated that Casper’s focus on larger institutions, which are “really sticky, long-term customers,” is attractive to Google Cloud. A spokesperson for Google’s cloud computing arm declined to elaborate on why it chose Casper but pointed to a statement from James Tromans, Web3 engineering director at Google Cloud, who said that through its work with Casper Labs, Google Cloud “can provide secure, reliable, and sustainable cloud infrastructure for developers.”
As opposed to other blockchains, Casper has a mix of additions that make it enticing for large organizations, said Manohar. This includes its use of existing programming languages, not ones specifically developed for the blockchain, as well as the ability for users to mix private blockchains with its public chain. (This feature is especially important, he said, when dealing with sensitive information, like Social Security ID numbers.)
While Manohar said he wasn’t able to disclose all of Casper Labs’s customers, he did point to his partnership with IPwe, a patents business, as an example.
Google Cloud’s collaboration with Casper Labs is its latest public step into the world of Web3. In the first half of 2022, it announced the creation of its digital assets and Web3 teams. In the fall of 2022, it unveiled one of its first offerings, a partnership with Coinbase to allow some of Google Cloud’s customers to pay for server space with cryptocurrency. It then launched the Blockchain Node Engine, a streamlined means for developers to access and use blockchains on Google’s servers.
Google Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine currently supports only Ethereum, and will support Solana in the near future, said a spokesperson. At the same time, the cloud computing giant is partnering with other blockchains and blockchain developers, including Aptos and BNB Chain, in a variety of ways. Just last week, before announcing the Casper Labs tie-up, Google Cloud said it will partner with the Tezos Foundation, which promotes the use and development of the Tezos blockchain.
