A Google and Chainlink (LINK) mashup? No kidding.
On Thursday, the Google Cloud team published an article titled “Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud.” Therein, the cloud computing suite’s developer advocate Allen Day outlined how Chainlink’s middleware oracle tech could be used to ping data from BigQuery, Google’s serverless platform-as-a-service data warehouse, onto the Ethereum blockchain.
The threefold meld can lead to what the Google Cloud team have dubbed hybrid cloud-blockchain applications, as Day highlighted:
“Possible applications are innumerable, but we’ve focused this post on a few that we think are of high and immediate utility: prediction marketplaces, futures contracts, and transaction privacy.”
The developer advocate proceeded to offer a brief technical explanation of how precisely Ethereum decentralized applications, or dapps, could retrieve data from BigQuery via a Chainlink oracle contract, which could accordingly activate the “execution of downstream Dapp-specific business logic.”
We're thrilled to share that Google is one of the great companies integrating #Chainlink into their approach to smart contract adoption. Here's how @GCPcloud users can use Chainlink to connect to BigQuery, one of Google's most popular cloud services. https://t.co/TfaGPP5TlS
— Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) June 13, 2019
Notably, such a system would give dapps the ability to call blockchain data from the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program, which hosts the cloud platform’s collection of data from eight public blockchains. As Coinmetrics.io co-founder Nic Carter explained separately on Twitter, the development meant that blockchains could now “know things about themselves,” so to speak.
Fascinating development. Trusted oracles which are able to insert data into contracts on-chain enables blockchains to _know things about themselves_ which allows for the settling of all manner of complex bets. https://t.co/avejIjAJDz
— nic carter (@nic__carter) June 13, 2019
As Carter suggested, that dynamic could be leveraged to create hedges and bets against all manner of things associated with blockchain tech. Day used the example of Ethereum gas prices in his own explanation:
“Financial contracts like futures and options were originally developed to enable enterprises to reduce/hedge their risk related to resources critical to their operation. Similarly, data about on-chain activity such as average gas prices, can be used to create simple financial instruments that provide payouts to their holders in cases where gas prices rise too high.”
The developer advocate also noted that the BigQuery Chainlink oracle could be used to improve on-chain privacy and prediction markets. Day said he and his peers expected the outlined “interoperability technique” to lead generally to the development of “hybrid applications that take the best of what smart contract platforms and cloud platforms have to offer.”
LINK Price Surges on the News
That posited possibility of bigger things to come wasn’t lost on LINK traders, either. Buy pressure acutely exploded around the decentralized oracle project’s token as word of Google Cloud’s work spread, with LINK hitting as high as $1.94 as its price spiked more than 60 percent on the day at one point.
The news comes as the Chainlink project has been on a tear in recent weeks. For one, the LINK token has been one of the year’s biggest risers, as its price is now up more than 150 percent on the month and up more than 760 percent since the beginning of January.
Why? Optimism has swirled in the project’s community before and after the launch of the Chainlink mainnet on Ethereum, which took place to much ado at the end of May. Upon the release, project maestro Sergey Nazarov thanked the stakeholders who had helped along the way:
“The entire team and I are deeply grateful to have an excited, insightful and genuinely interested community that sees the long-term value of what we’re building. Thank you for all of your support.”
The oracle play has also been building up steam on the heels of recent collaborations. Last month, Chainlink locked down a partnership with Hedera Hashgraph to service that project’s distributed ledger with decentralized oracles.
That deal brought the amount of cryptoeconomy partnership’s Chainlink has hammered out to approximately 30. More recently, the Matic Network — a proof of stake sidechain project — announced this week it would be integrating Chainlink’s tech into its system. It’s likely only the latest of many more such partnerships to come.
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