The Google Cloud team has integrated Chainlink’s oracle middleware with its BigQuery enterprise cloud data warehouse, allowing for an on-chain and cloud-based interaction with Ethereum decentralized applications and smart contracts. The news was revealed in a development report published on June 13.
As previously reported, a blockchain oracle is a system that provides the necessary external data — i.e. the variables to be evaluated — to trigger the execution of a smart contract when the original terms of the contract are met.
The development post writes that Google has made public blockchain data for eight different cryptocurrencies freely and publicly available in BigQuery through its Google Cloud Public Datasets Program.
While this resource allows for “the development of business processes based upon automated analysis of the indexed blockchain datasets,” the report notes that these nonetheless remain limited by the fact that they use the resource as an input to an off-chain business process.
Google’s way to solve this task is to enable the Ethereum smart contract platform to interact with its BigQuery enterprise cloud data warehouse automatically and on-chain by using Chainlink’s oracle middleware.
This allows for a smart contract to be triggered using data that is retrieved from an on-chain query to the internet-hosted data warehouse. Google notes that the system can be generalized to develop hybrid cloud-blockchain applications, in which smart contracts efficiently delegate complex operations to cloud resources.
Aside from outlining in technical detail how the interoperable looping functions, Google’s post also proposes three implementations for hybrid cloud-blockchain applications that it claims are of high and immediate utility: prediction marketplaces, futures contracts and transaction privacy.
As reported, Google announced in August 2018 that it had officially made the Ethereum blockchain dataset available in BigQuery.
This May, blockchain platform Qtum — which like the Ethereum platform focuses on smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps) — revealed its collaboration with Google Cloud as a software partner to increase the ease of launching native products for users.
To press time, the Chainlink token (LINK) — ranked 24th largest cryptocurrency market cap — is up almost 34% on the day to trade at $1.53, according to CoinMarketCap.
