Google Labs Starts Up a Blockchain Division

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Here's a fun new report from Bloomberg: Google is forming a blockchain division. The news comes hot on the heels of a Bloomberg report from yesterday that quoted Google's president of commerce as saying, 'Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to.' Web3 is apparently becoming a thing at Google. Shivakumar Venkataraman, a longtime Googler from the advertising division, is running the blockchain group, which lives under the nascent 'Google Labs' division that was started about three months ago.

Labs is home to 'high-potential, long-term projects,' basically making it the new Google X division (X was turned into a less-Google-focused Alphabet division in 2016). Bavor used to be vice president of virtual reality, and Labs contains all of those VR and augmented reality projects, like the 'Project Starline' 3D video booth and Google's AR goggles. Not much is known about the group, except that it is focused on 'blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies.' Google's growth into a web giant has made it a pioneer in distributed computing and database development, so maybe it could make some noise in this area as well.

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