Google announced the launch of a new Blockchain RPC (Remote Procedure Call) service — this service is fully compatible with the EIP-1474 (Ethereum JSON-RPC) standard, allowing Web3 developers to easily integrate it into their applications.
Let’s first answer the question of what this service does. It allows to significantly speed up Web3/Dapp applications Ethereum being quite slow creates a bad user experience when in such an application a user has to wait for a long reaction/response to some of his actions. Google decided to help with this very real problem.
«RPCs are actively used when interacting with objects on the Ethereum blockchain, in particular with NFT. RPCs are used to query data related to NFTs: owners, listings for specific wallet addresses, collections, mining time, transaction history, and other metadata»
The next logical question is why does Google need this? On the one hand it gave 1 million transactions per day for free, anything above that will have to be paid for. On the other hand, even with this caveat, it’s a rather strange business, because Ethereum-applications will not make much money yet (at least in 2024). Therefore, the real reason for Google Cloud’s entry into this very specific sphere is still shrouded in darkness. It’s almost certainly some kind of ahead-of-the-curve bet similar to the way many are now betting on AI to avoid missing out on future hypothetical opportunities in this rapidly gaining popularity topic.
And to conclude with a bit of technical details from the press release:
«Blockchain RPC is launching with our free tier that offers up to 100 requests per second, enabling developers to build real-time and data-intensive applications. The service also launches with support for Ethereum mainnet and testnets, expanding to several additional chains over the next year.
Blockchain RPC is fully compatible with the Ethereum JSON-RPC standard, allowing developers to integrate it into their applications with a single line of code.»