Google is also starting to take blockchain seriously with a new department under Google Labs. However, the plans are still early.
According to Bloomberg, the new division will be led by Shivakumar Venkataraman, who served as vice president and general manager of some of Google’s advertising activities until early this year.
Not much more is known about Google’s plans at the moment. However, the fact that it falls under Google Labs does indicate that it is a project that is rather experimental and aimed at the long term, so it is not yet a full-fledged business unit.
This may mean that Google will eventually also look at things such as cryptocurrencies or NFTs, but it is about the underlying technology in the first instance. For example, blockchain is a type of database, but with the important difference that the database is not managed by one party but by several parties who have to verify each operation.
This is useful if parties do not trust each other. Still, it also has the disadvantage that processing transactions require much more power and computing power than with a traditional database.