Google Partners With Coinbase to Accept Crypto Payments for Cloud Services

On Tuesday, October 11, tech giant Google announced its partnership with crypto exchange Coinbase wherein it would allow users of Google Cloud services to pay in cryptocurrencies by early 2023.

The announcement came at Google’s Cloud Next conference yesterday. The Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service will start accepting payments in digital currencies from a handful of its customers in Web3.

The Web3 is a commonly used term recently referring to the decentralized internet era free from the absolute control of big-tech giants. Amit Zavery, vice president and general manager and head of platform at Google Cloud, said the overtime, Google will allow more of its customers to make payments in digital assets.

He called it “a new, long-term strategic partnership to better serve the growing Web3 ecosystem and its developers”. In addition, Google is also planning to use Coinbase Prime for institutional crypto services such as secure reporting and custody.

The deal will be of mutual benefit to Google and Coinbase. As part of this partnership, Coinbase will move its data-related applications to Google from the existing Amazon Web services. Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s VP of business development said that the company’s all data-related applications will move to the Google Cloud platform.

Migdal added that Coinbase was in talks with Google for quite some time. The two players parallel discussed supporting commerce transactions, cloud usage, and the Prime services.

Speaking on the development, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong commented: “We are excited Google Cloud has selected Coinbase to help bring Web3 to a new set of users and provide powerful solutions to developers … With more than 100 million verified users and 14,500 institutional clients, Coinbase has spent more than a decade building industry-leading products on top of blockchain technology.”

The recent development is a testament to the fact that the big tech industry is willing to seek exposure to the crypto asset class. As cryptocurrencies becomes mainstream with greater regulatory clarity, we will see more such application-specific use cases for digital assets.

In another development, Google has now started showing wallet balances by just typing the Ethereum addresses in the Google search bar. Google fetches the data from Ethereum block explorer Etherscan. Currently, this search feature is only applicable to Ethereum addresses and not to Bitcoin addresses.