Google Cloud adds 11 blockchains to data warehouse ‘BigQuery’



Google Cloud’s BigQuery service just added 11 blockchain networks to its data warehouse, according to a Sept. 21 blog post. The new networks include Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum’s Görli testnet, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon’s mainnet, Polygon’s Mumbai testnet and Tron.

BigQuery is Google’s data warehouse service. Enterprise firms can use it to store their data and make queries of it. It also provides some public data sets that can be queried, including Google Trends, American Community Service demographic information, Google Analytics and others.

In 2018, Google launched a Bitcoin data set as part of the service, and later that year, it added Ethereum as well. It continued to expand its blockchain coverage in February 2019, adding Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin and Zcash. The Sept. 21 announcement means that BigQuery now carries data from a total of 19 blockchain networks.

In addition to adding these new blockchains, Google has also implemented a new feature intended to make blockchain queries easier to execute. Through a series of user-defined functions, the team has provided methods to handle the long-form decimal results often found on blockchains. In its post, Google claimed that these new functions will “give customers access to longer decimal digits for their blockchain data and reduce rounding errors in computation.”

Google Cloud has been taking an increasing interest in blockchain tech in 2023. On July 7, it partnered with Voltage, a Lightning Network infrastructure provider. It also partnered with Web3 startup Orderly Network on Sept. 14 to help provide off-chain components for decentralized finance.