The Head of Strategy at Google, Richard Widmann, has called Google Cloud the Layer Zero for Web3. He said this at the Mainnet 2022 crypto-summit in Newyork City which had in attendance crypto-leaders, developers, builders and investors.

Widdman hinted that Google’s ideological leaning is related to Crypto’s core values of open-source development and decentralization. 

While interviewed by Decrypt, he unveiled that he’s working to “build a giant bridge” between companies in Web3 and Blockchain by rendering node services through Google Cloud. Nodes are the core of blockchain technology; they help keep track of cryptocurrencies.

He underscored the importance of nodes and talked about the decentralization of Google’s nodes so it can be immune to issues like internet outages and political unrest because “each node is a single point of failure”.

And the purpose of decentralization is a mere joke if in the end, Amazon and Google, two big tech companies, control the majority of Blockchain nodes.

While speaking about the future of Web 3, he said, “If everything is running on Google, I will be the first to say that is a problem, frankly.” This implies that to achieve decentralization, more players need to be in the cloud business.

Data from Ethernodes.org showed that almost 62% of all nodes on the Ethereum network operate via cloud services, such as Amazon. Of those hosted nodes, 50% currently use AWS(Amazon Web Service) and 14% by Hetzner, a German-based cloud service provider.

Widdman, while in full support of decentralization and sees it as strategic to the overall Web3 goal of Google, doesn’t agree that everything should be decentralized. He stated that “there are also a lot of things that don’t require immutable ledgers.”

Google Cloud wants to serve as a single platform that hosts multiple other protocols, especially layer One protocols.

He hinted at this while contrasting Google Cloud’s vision with that of Avalanche One, “Any layer one protocol is running compute containers, generally on a cloud of some kind,… Avalanche doesn’t have a cloud business. They run on data centres, just like every other layer one.”

“They try and set themselves as that foundational layer, but ultimately, it’s all running on top of a compute container hosted somewhere, and that’s where the cloud providers come in.”

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