Google has tapped a startup token project, Chainlink, as an official Cloud Partner and the relationship suggests a deep and detailed interest in blockchain technology by the Mountain View giant.

The partnership, described in a detail Google Cloud blog post, aims to place BigQuery data on the blockchain using a “Chainlink oracle smart contract.” BigQuery is Google’s data warehousing and business intelligence solution.

Founders Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis created SmartContract.com and Chainlink in order to create proper middleware between traditional data sources and blockchain-based systems. They are working with money movers SWIFT as well as database company Oracle.

“We realized that a reliable oracle mechanism is a gating issue for the creation of most of the use cases that people are expecting from our space, and set out to solve this limitation of blockchain infrastructure with security, reliability, and easy consumption of the inputs/outputs needed by smart contracts to reach this new level of usefulness,” said Nazarov, adding:

“In this case we are working with Google as someone who we’ve successfully made an on-chain data provider that can now securely interact with smart contracts that want to consume their high-quality data and/or various off-chain services. We’re trying to create the next generation of smart contracts that are able to go beyond tokenization, and will find their usefulness based on interactions with market events (DeFi), IoT events (Decentralized Insurance) and various other use cases.”

It’s important to note that this is one of the few blockchain products that Google has singled out in this way making the announcement a feather in Chainlink’s proverbial cap.

“At a high level, Ethereum Dapps (i.e. smart contract applications) request data from Chainlink, which in turn retrieves data from a web service built with Google App Engine and BigQuery,” wrote Allen Day, a Developer Advocate with Google. “One or more Chainlink nodes are listening for these calls, and upon observing, one executes the requested job. External adapters are service-oriented modules that extend the capability of the Chainlink node to authenticated APIs, payment gateways, and external blockchains. In this case, the Chainlink node interacts with a purpose-built App Engine web service.”

All of this means, quite simply, that Google’s products can now interact with decentralized applications in the same way, say, a client app can interact with a standard database server. Chainlink acts as the data middleman.

“Allowing smart contracts to interact with a data source of Google BigQuery’s quality, enables various new and exciting capabilities for Ethereum contracts in general e.g. more private ethereum transactions via submarine sends, as well as various exciting use cases/Dapps like prediction markets that will base their outcomes on BigQuery’s data,” said Nazarov. “We’ve really enjoyed working with the folks at Google on this initial implementation, and we’re looking forward to working with them in many more ways to come.”

Chainlink’s associated token, LINK, shot up on the news, hitting an all-time high of $1.95 before dropping to about $1.72 today.

Photo by Hrishikesh Pathak on Unsplash