SOL Price Eyes 100% Gains As Google Cloud Officially Backs Solana's Validator Program

On Saturday, Google’s computing arm Google Cloud announced that it is running a block-producing Solana validator “to participate in and validate the network,” sending SOL prices soaring by over 11% to tap $36.87 at press time.

In a thread of tweets, Google cloud stated that it was working with Solana to bring the Blockchain Node Engine next year, enabling anyone to launch a dedicated Solana node in the cloud. Launched last month, the Blockchain Node Engine is “a fully managed node-hosting service” that can minimize the need for node operations.

While self-managed nodes are often difficult to deploy and require constant management, the Blockchain Node Engine helps networks such as Solana, which require dedicated nodes to relay transactions, deploy smart contracts, and read or write blockchain data with reliability, performance, and security seamlessly. Currently, this service only supports Ethereum.

Further, the cloud service noted that it is currently indexing Solana data to onboard it to BigQuery next year, a move that will make “it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data.” BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables users to access a wide range of historical data about an ecosystem.

Currently, BigQuery supports six cryptocurrency blockchain datasets, including Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Zcash. Confirming the news at the ongoing Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Google’s Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal stated that this feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023.

Google’s announcement comes against the backdrop of constant node-related problems that have plagued Solana, often leading to outages and deep price slumps. At the conference, Solana founder Anatoly Yakonevo termed the move a “pretty big lift from Google”, adding that it would help with the complex engineering problems facing the layer one network.

Since tapping an all-time high of $260 last November, Solana’s price has plunged roughly 86%, with the frequent consensus failures on nodes leading to outages spooking investors. Today’s announcement is thus a big boost for the ecosystem, with Solana users hoping that a stable network will translate into a price surge.

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