Google announced recently that it will rely on Coinbase to start letting some customers pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies early in 2023. Coinbase also revealed that it would move some of its applications to Google’s cloud infrastructure.
The deal, which was announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference, might succeed in luring cutting-edge companies to Google in a fierce, fast-growing market, where Google’s top competitors do not currently permit clients to pay with digital currencies.
The cloud business helps diversify Google parent Alphabet away from advertising, and it now accounts for 9% of revenue, up from less than 6% three years ago, as it is expanding more quickly than Alphabet as a whole.
Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s Vice President For Business Development revealed that Coinbase, which generates a majority of its revenue from retail transactions, will move data-related applications to Google from the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud, which Coinbase has relied on for years.
Amit Zavery, Vice President & General Manager & Head of Platform at Google Cloud also further stated that the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service will initially accept cryptocurrency payments from a handful of customers in the Web3 world who want to pay with cryptocurrency, thanks to an integration with the Coinbase Commerce service.
The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. However, Migdal stated, “Like other Coinbase Commerce arrangements, Coinbase will earn a percentage of transactions that go through it.”
It wasn’t a guarantee that Google would go with Coinbase for the payments portion of the deal.
However, Zavery commented, “We did look at other companies for the cryptocurrency side of it. Ultimately, Coinbase had the greatest capability.”
Google is also exploring how it can use Coinbase Prime, a service that securely stores organizations’ cryptocurrencies and allows them to execute trades.
Zavery said that Google will experiment and see if it can participate in managing cryptocurrency assets.