Google Cloud Is Now Running a Solana Validator

Solana’s price briefly surged to a four-week high of $38.48 on Saturday after Google Cloud announced it had become a validator on the blockchain.

The cloud computing arm of the search engine giant said it will bring its newly launched Blockchain Node Engine to Solana next year, making it easier for anyone to run a dedicated node through the cloud.

Google Cloud announced that it would first support Ethereum when it unveiled its fully-managed node engine on Oct. 28. A dedicated team will actively monitor the nodes for outages and security issues.

Google is also indexing Solana’s blockchain data to BigQuery, its data warehouse system, so that Solana developers can easily access historical data. 

Solana shared its own plans for next year at its four-day conference, Solana Breakpoint. In a demo in Lisbon, Solana Labs’ co-founders Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko presented their upcoming “Saga” Web3 smartphone.

The phone’s in-built Solflare crypto wallet can sync to decentralized applications, including those that comes from Solana’s free-free app store. Its SIM cards are powered by the Helium Network and T-Mobile’s wireless 5G network.