Google is Building a Web3 Team

Web2 Platforms are pivoting to take over the Web3 Movement

Personal Note

My Mom is in the hospital with terminal cancer, so my cadence of articles might be significantly lower during this period.

Silicon Valley Trying to Hack Web3

With so many companies trying to monetize NFT hype, even Meta and Google are going after Web3.

Even big-shot Ex-Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt says he’s invested “a little bit” of money into cryptocurrencies — but for him, the most interesting part of blockchain isn’t virtual currency. It’s the future of Web3.

So Google is literally going after the blockchain crowd now. Google’s cloud group has formed a “Web3 team” to capitalize on booming popularity of crypto. Former Citigroup executive James Tromans will lead the new Google group that will build services to help developers construct Web3 applications.

I just don’t think Google Cloud is making much headway against Azure and AWS who continue to grow so quickly in Cloud computing. However, Google is diversifying its business model very successfully, the total opposite to what Facebook is doing “escaping” into some speculative future in the Metaverse. Facebook is most likely now to clone Roblox, although it’s failing in most of its attempts at innovation.

With a monopoly in the App store, advertising and search, Google thinks it can still own a piece of Web3. Google wants to be the first choice for hosting blockchain apps.

We now in 2022 live in a world where even Gucci is accepting crypto. Bitcoin has yet to tank even though the stock market and NASDAQ are showing real weakness, I think we can expect Bitcoin’s price to black swan dive back to correction levels as we head closer to 2023. Remember, the stock market is a future predictor of consensus typically in the race of four to eight months of future projections.

“We’re not trying to be part of that cryptocurrency wave directly,” said Google Cloud vice president Amit Zavery.

One of the objectives of Web3 is to de-leverage our reliance on the likes of Facebook and Google, so their objections to this is clear, they want to maintain their duopolistic leverage on our data, online habits and platform monopolization. Meanwhile Amazon and ByteDance are taking advertising dollars away from Google and Facebook pretty much each year after 2019 and now accelerating in 2022 forwards.

As for Google’s intersection with Web3 it remains a bit unclear. Early efforts could include better management of blockchain nodes and software for exploring blockchain data in third-party applications.

“We’re providing technologies for companies to use and take advantage of the distributed nature of Web3 in their current businesses and enterprises.”

So I think from a Cloud perspective, we’re talking about blockchain-as-a-service really.

What’s clear is Google and Facebook are concerned about the NFT hype and they too appear to have FOMO in their cash laden veins.

In an email sent to employees Friday, May 6th, 2022, Google Cloud vice president Amit Zavery said that while Web3 was still in its early stages, the market “is already demonstrating tremendous potential with many customers asking us to increase our support for Web3 and Crypto related technologies,” per the report.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitzavery/

In a world saturated with NFT hype and a declining quality of objective search in Google, is there a changing of the guard in the air? Gucci is accepting payment in more than 10 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and shiba inu. Bitcoin’s prevalence in institutional money (fake money helicopter money of the Fed’s QE) has greatly inflated the price of crypto and VC funds heading into Web3 projects accordingly - not to mention real-estate in Florida and other Sunbelt states.

The Fed has inadvertently been pumping crypto and Web’s outlandish promises. It’s only normal for deep pocket duopolies like Google and Facebook to think they should own a piece of the pie. Such is the winner-takes-all capitalism that America has succumbed to where free-market capitalism in recent years has deteriorated into. It’s Cyberpunk Capitalism, and the end-game is Silicon Valley incentivized dystopia. Don't tell the Crypto Tycoons this. Twitter being gamed into a Web3 platform is a PayPal Mafia conspiracy story.

The writing is on the wall.

Google’s cloud group, whose parent company has reportedly shifted its major source of revenues from advertisement to cloud computing, has announced forming a new team specifically for building blockchain infrastructure. It’s basically what Chinese companies did about three to five years ago.

This isn't quite Google's first foray into this space. In January, it announced a Digital Assets Team and said it would look into ways of allowing Google Cloud customers to make and receive crypto payments. It’s sort of sad to see what Facebook and Google have become in an effort to maintain their own self-driving digital empires. Both companies have significant anticompetitive practices and lawsuits coming. Antitrust regulation isn’t what it once was in America.

The truth is Google has no real idea what Web3 is or how to empower it. The new team will comprise employees who have been involved in Web3 projects either at Google or on their own time, according to Zavery. He said Google may create a system that will enable other companies to make it easy for people to look into blockchain data. Google's tools will be compatible with other platforms like Amazon Web Services, Zavery said.

Web3 is a Rebirth of a Scam

Web3 is a name coined by some technologists as a new kind of internet service that’s built using decentralized blockchains. This is basically the plight of Silicon Valley and Venture Capitals to take control of the crypto movement and to fudge NFT FOMO into a way to prop up American GDP that is going to plunge in the great reckoning - the result of failures of the Fed, America’s central bank, to do QE properly during the pandemic. It’s a highly manipulated system now in America by the financial elite, the one percent. Google belongs to that group.

Amit Zavery, a vice president at Google Cloud, expressed the urgency of developing a blockchain-focused team as the leader of such a field in an email sent to his employees, the story that was broke by CNBC last last week.

Hacking Web3 Before TikTok Eats your Lunch

As Google is seeing even YouTube traffic been eaten up by TikTok’s super-app, Facebook and Google must be wondering what they are doing wrong? While YouTube leads how the creator economy is forming, Web3 platforms benefit creators on much better terms. Even as YouTube tries to clone elements of TikTok with YouTube shorts and Facebook of course also can only copy with Instagram Reels. It’s a sad attempt at maintaining power.

Platforms want to maintain their centralization and dominance, can they hack the world of Dapps? There's an element of incongruity here. A core aim of the Web3 movement is making the web decentralized and shifting power away from major companies like Google, Amazon and Meta. Still, Web3 developers need to host their apps and services somewhere, and Google wants to be their first choice.

Schmidt says his interest in Web3 involves a concept called “tokenomics,” which refers to the specific supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrencies. Schmidt also notes that Web3 could come with new models for content ownership and new ways of compensating people. Meanwhile young people are trusting Google search less since the front page is littered with Ads and the clickbait incentive culture Google itself created to benefit itself and its own products.

What Amit is proposing is nothing less than trying to hack Web3 apps and traffic. Going forward, Google could devise a system other companies could employ to make blockchain data easy for people to explore, while simplifying the process of building and running blockchain nodes for validating and recording transactions, Zavery said.

Silicon Valley must feel threatened by Bitcoin at this point, that has a greater following than even its culture of hype and hero worship due to the big salaries companies like Google and Meta can afford to given even their software engineers, compared to other companies.

Googlers Are Watching

While Google struggles to keep up with Microsoft and Amazon in the Cloud, it’s losing marketshare to TikTok among young people slowing down YouTube’s growth. But blockchain applications continue to find their way into the mainstream and have increasing relevance in industries such as financial services and retail, said Zavery.

“From collectibles to music royalties, Web3 represents an exciting future for the music industry that will help our artists reach millions upon millions of new fans in interesting and innovative ways,” CEO Steve Cooper said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

As Google watches the rise of Coinbase, Binance and Ethereum it must be wondering if it didn’t take the crypto trend seriously enough. Facebook’s failure with the Libra stablecoin was a major mess up by Mark Zuckerberg in strategy and company positioning. VR is sort of a lame backup plan, as it loses the war against TikTok, underestimating China at nearly every turn.

Facebook and Google give leadership to crypto projects doomed to fail. James Tromans, a former Citigroup executive who arrived at Google in 2019, will lead the product and engineering group and report to Zavery. Sure guys, let’s give our Web3 projects to a “technical director”, that sure sounds like a good idea.

Google trails Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, but the business is growing faster than its core advertising unit. The reality is Google’s best days are behind it, it’s best chance to remain relevant is to continue to diversify the business as Microsoft has done with gaming, cybersecurity and B2B. Google traditionally has relied overly on digital advertising revenue but has some of the best R&D in the world in artificial intelligence and will continue this trend in the 2020s.

Personal Note

My Mom is in the hospital with terminal cancer, so my cadence of articles might be significantly lower during this period.

Wishing you a great Sunday, thanks for reading!