Google Cloud Announces It's Now A Solana Validator; Announcement Sends SOL Price Up By 15%

Google Cloud, the cloud computing division of the search engine giant Google, announced over the weekend that it is running a validator on the Solana blockchain. SOL, the native token for Solana immediately saw a price jump of about 15% following the announcement.

The official Twitter account of Google Cloud tagged Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and chief executive of Solana, in a tweet that seemingly teased the special announcement.

"Hey @aeyakovenko [waving hand emoji] Should we tell our followers the big news?" the account said in a Twitter thread Saturday.

"Now that we got your attention... check this out: Google Cloud is running a block-producing @solana validator to participate in and validate the network," it continued.

It then announced that aside from participating and validating the network, the team also plans to bring its Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain next year.

For context, the Blockchain Node Engine is a node hosting service that supports the Ethereum blockchain. "We want to make it one-click to run a Solana node cost-effectively," Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal said during Solana's Breakpoint 2022 conference in Lisbon, the ecosystem's annual gathering, according to Decrypt.

Moreover, Google Cloud revealed that it is now indexing Solana data and including it in its BigQuery data warehouse. The feature, which will officially launch in the Q3 of 2023 will reportedly "make it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data."

Yakovenko thanked Google for adding Solana to BigQuery, calling the effort a "pretty big lift" from the search engine giant. He also said Google will be essential in building better SDKs to hasten the development of applications as well as in resolving issues concerning the storage of seed phrases.

"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," the Solana executive said, as per the outlet.

Mittal went on to share that Google Cloud will also introduce its credit program to "select startups in the Solana ecosystem" with up to $100,000 in Cloud Credits available to qualified applicants.

Following the announcement, SOL traded up 15% at $38.48. As of 1:52 a.m. ET Monday, SOL was trading down 9.13% at $32.47 with a 24-hour volume of $1,756,689,814, based on the latest data from CoinMarketCap.