Singaporean blockchain firm Zilliqa Group has announced a multi-year strategic alliance with Google Cloud, which will enhance the scalability, resilience, and data availability of the Zilliqa layer 1 blockchain protocol.
With Google Cloud’s involvement, ventures both within Zilliqa
Group and across the wider ecosystem stand to benefit from a more robust platform underpinning the range of Web3 services and decentralized applications (dApps) built on the Zilliqa blockchain, the duo said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to the statement, Google Cloud will become a staked seed node (SSN) operator on the Zilliqa network, joining an existing set of 28 SSN operators.
As an SSN operator, Google Cloud will provide node infrastructure hosting services while helping to validate transactions across the network, enabling more users to participate in its decentralization, securitization, and governance.
Having also chosen Google Cloud as its strategic cloud provider, Zilliqa Group will use Google Cloud’s open, secure, scalable, and energy-efficient infrastructure and services to strengthen the flexibility, resilience, and data availability of its blockchain.
“Our strategic alliance with Google Cloud is more than just a technological collaboration; it’s a strategic alignment to further the ambitions of our group of ventures and revenue-generating organizations,” said Matt Dyer, Chief Executive Officer, Zilliqa Group.
“Google Cloud’s expertise in infrastructure, combined with their role as a staked seed node partner, underscores our commitment to excellence, both within the Zilliqa Group of companies and across the wider ecosystem,
“Together, we’re setting the stage for a new wave of innovation and growth in the Web3 space,” he said.
Launched in 2017, Zilliqa, formerly Zilliqa Research Pte. Ltd., provides Web3 and blockchain infrastructure as its core.
The firm aims to facilitate industries, governments, and entrepreneurs’ seamless transition into Web3 and the spatial web, delivering secure and sustainable solutions that drive the creation of immersive products and experiences.
The firm was the first public blockchain to implement sharding to its mainnet to address blockchain scalability limitations and deploy Scilla, a peer-reviewed programming language that is designed with smart contract safety in mind.
Sharding is a unique mechanism that increases the overall transaction processing capability of the Zilliqa network, by dividing it into smaller groups of nodes (i.e., shards) and having each shard simultaneously process a subset of transactions.
As Zilliqa consistently refines and expands its layer 1 blockchain capabilities—from adopting a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism and an improved sharding system to launching Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility—the emphasis on network stability remains paramount.
To meet the dynamic demands of its platform, Zilliqa leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
With GKE’s load balancing, autoscaling, rollback, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capabilities, Zilliqa can keep its nodes running 24/7 and offer developers the unprecedented ability to scale Web3 projects spanning the realms of gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), loyalty programs, and the spatial web.
Zilliqa is also using Security Command Center, a native security and risk management platform for Google Cloud, to detect and remediate potential vulnerabilities and threats in the environment that hosts its nodes and applications.
To eliminate technical roadblocks associated with blockchain analytics and further enhance data transparency, Zilliqa will take advantage of BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse, to make its blockchain datasets readily available for public inspection and analysis.
This will allow anyone to easily access and query transaction data from the Zilliqa mainnet to monitor gas fees over time, identify the most active or popular tokens and dApps across the Zilliqa ecosystem, audit groups of transactions for regulatory compliance, and more.
In addition, businesses and Web3 developers in the Zilliqa ecosystem would be able to leverage data-driven insights from BigQuery to better understand the behavior of their users and design features or experiences that deliver more utility and value.
To enable its staff across subsidiary companies and 15 countries to seamlessly connect, create and collaborate, Zilliqa Group has adopted Google Workspace.
Built on its cloud-native communication and collaboration platform, Google Workspace brings together the applications people know and love—like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more—into a single, integrated workspace, with built-in enterprise-grade access management, device management, and data protection, to establish a secure remote working environment from anywhere, on any device.
“Google Cloud is focused on providing the foundational technology on which developers can build innovative blockchain-based products and services that will help grow the Web3 ecosystem,” said James Tromans, Head of Web3, Google Cloud.
“With this in mind, our engineering work with Zilliqa Group will be centered around improving the scalability and resilience of the base layer to better support novel scaling solutions like sharding, as well as enhancing the availability of blockchain datasets for public inspection and analysis,
“With the Asia Pacific region emerging as a hotbed for Web3 innovation, we look forward to collaborating with more companies like Zilliqa Group with roots in this region,” he added.