Polygon partners with Google Cloud as Filecoin breaks into cloud market

Google Cloud and Polygon Labs have announced a strategic partnership. Meanwhile, Filecoin has announced its own cloud service plans.

Google Cloud to will provide access to Polygon

Polygon Labs has entered a multi-year agreement with Google’s cloud computing division, as announced by both companies on April 27.

The partnership will see Google Cloud provide customers with automated access to Polygon blockchain nodes through its fully managed node hosting service.

 

Google Cloud will also contribute cloud services that support Polygon’s new zkEVM scaling solution. Polygon Labs said that executing the network’s zero-knowledge proofs on Google Cloud is “significantly faster and cheaper” than its current approach.

The partnership will additionally provide features related to Polygon Supernets — described as a “dedicated app-chain” — by the end of the third quarter of 2023.

Plus, new Polygon-backed startups will be able to receive funding including $200,000 in Google Cloud credits. This funding is part of a broader set of benefits that extend to other Web3-related startups, as announced by Google Cloud on April 25.

The partnership announcement notes that Google Cloud already offers some support for Polygon: Polygon proof-of-stake nodes are available through the Google Cloud marketplace, and Polygon has been included in Google Cloud datasets since 2021.

 

Filecoin aims to provide cloud services

Elsewhere, Filecoin has announced a stack of services intended as a decentralized alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Azure.

The new service stack includes access to data storage, a data storage market, deal management tools, client engagement tools, dataset processing tools, and tools that allow customers to upload and retrieve data. The service stack will additionally include tools with functions called Filecoin Web Infrastructure (FWI).

Filecoin already offers basic decentralized data storage, allowing users to earn crypto tokens by providing cloud storage. The project’s parent company, Protocol Labs, is also responsible for IPFS, a decentralized storage network.

Filecoin seems to have limited resources despite its ambitions. Protocol Labs announced in February 2023 that it would lay off 20% of its staff.