Flare Grows Its Data Ecosystem As Google Cloud Joins Platform As Network Validator

Flare announces the addition of Google Cloud as a network validator and contributor to its Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO). Flare will join the Google for Startups Cloud program as well. 

In an announcement this Monday, Flare, the EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain for data, welcomed Google Cloud as the latest infrastructure provider on its network. The partnership will see Google Cloud become both a network validator and contributor to the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) on the Flare network. The partnership aims to further decentralize the validation of blocks on Flare, with Google Cloud now responsible for proposing and validating new blocks on the network. 

As part of the collaboration, Flare also announced it will join the Google For Startups Cloud Program, an initiative aiming to accelerate the growth of Web 3 startups. By joining the program, Flare developers will have access to financial and technical support from Google Cloud partners.

Following the latest addition, Flare boasts 100+ organizations that have taken up the combined role of validator and contributor to its FTSO, helping secure the platform and support the chain’s proof of stake consensus mechanism. In addition, these infrastructure providers will contribute to Flare’s highly decentralized price oracles, providing publicly available pricing data for users and developers on Flare. 

In a comment to our desks, Hugo Philion, Co-Founder and CEO of Flare, believes Google Cloud’s addition aligns ‘perfectly’ with Flare’s vision of providing trustless, decentralized data to its users.

“As the blockchain for data, we are excited that Google Cloud is joining our existing decentralized network of infrastructure providers who contribute to Flare,” Philion said. “Our work together will help deliver a more robust decentralized smart contract platform that places decentralized data at its core.”

Joining as an infrastructure provider, Google Cloud will enhance decentralized applications (DApps) built on Flare and other chains by providing high-quality access to decentralized data, including price and time series data, blockchain event and state data, and Web2 API data. Notwithstanding, the collaboration will also provide higher scalability, low latency, and minimized costs to decentralized data, increasing the relevance of blockchain in solving real-life problems. 

 “Data access at scale is important to increase relevant blockchain use cases and greater global adoption of the technology. Google Cloud becoming a validator on the Flare network will help support that mission,” James Tromans, Head of Web3 at Google Cloud stated.

Adding to the security and validation benefits, Google Cloud will also provide an infrastructure to drive the development of “the next generation of blockchain applications”, as explained by Philion. The platform is optimized for decentralized data acquisition and designed for the heavy data demand from these future DApps, including Machine Learning/AI, RWA tokenization, gaming and social DApps, and the partnership with Google Cloud may drive development. 

“This [development of futuristic DApps] is made possible by the infrastructure provider role, which Google Cloud is adopting,” Hugo Philion added. “Combining decentralized data acquisition with network validation in a single role is why Flare is the Blockchain for Data.”

Flare targets more developments on its FTSO platform

Crucially, adding infrastructure providers to Flare allows low-cost EVM smart contracts to connect to decentralized data at scale, with low latency and minimal costs. This gives developers and users trustless access to the broadest range of data. As such, Flare expands the utility of blockchain,  providing developers with the volume and variety of decentralized data they need to build use cases that lead to great blockchain adoption.

Hugo Philion further explained the current challenges that existing decentralized data oracles face, stating: 

“Although much of the existing utility in the blockchain space comes from the nexus of

decentralized computation with external data, existing oracle systems suffer from meaningful drawbacks they are hard to decentralize, expensive to use, difficult to scale, and have high latency.”

Flare solves these issues via its FTSO platform, allowing developers and users to optimize their DApps for decentralized data acquisition and can give them all the data they need to build new, and more relevant use cases beyond financial speculation. Additionally, Flare also launched the FAssets platform, a trust-minimizing bridging technology, which allows DApps built on Flare to integrate smart contract-based and non-smart contract-based assets within the app. This brings new users and value to Flare as part of a vertically integrated blockchain for data. 

Flare is the only smart contract platform optimized for decentralized data acquisition and designed for the heavy data demands of the next generation of blockchain applications, including Machine Learning/AI, RWA tokenization, gaming and social. This is made possible by the infrastructure provider role, which Google Cloud is adopting. Combining decentralized data acquisition with network validation in a single role is why Flare is the Blockchain for Data.