Just a couple of days ago, a new article popped up from the Google cloud blog. Its arrival was subtle but its content is relevant. It discussed Google’s welcome to Ethereum to BigQuery. Blockchain is a distributed database. It’s immutable records and decentralization are a big aspect of what made its technology so famous. All its database transaction record with cryptographic security, meaning no one can tamper with it.
Ethereum introduced the smart contracts. These programs allow the automatic transfer of assets with certain conditions to follow. This has made so many new business models come to fruition. In the past, Google has already made the Bitcoin blockchain dataset available via BigQuery. At the same time, Bitcoin only has owner accounts compared to Ethereum’s smart contract accounts. With this, users have access to completely different set of analytics such as the smart contract transaction aggregate.
If you’re unaware of what BigQuery is, it’s basically a web service that allows interactive analysis of high quantities of datasets while working with Google Storage. It’s an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Google highlighted that the smart contract that was most transacted was the CyptoKitty game which was used more than 2 million times. This created a good example of what sort of queries can be conducted onto the dataset.
The Ethereum ETL project formerly extracted data from blockchain notes. The limitations include the exclusion of contracts made through message calls, an average of 10% of overall contract data can’t be found and the requirement to cast token values because of BigQuery storing it as strings. Google has pointed out that analyzing the Ethereum blockchain will lead to better business decision making.
Pros of this move
Through this move, Google is able to bring and widen a great amount of possibilities in doing analytics. It’s become a whole lot easier to know which are the most known smart contacts and the most known collectibles. You can even check the token’s health on the basis of the sender or receiver’s ratio, along with other metrics. These are all great benefits to take note of.
It is able to aid in creating business decisions like choosing which improvement to prioritize in the Ethereum architecture to balancing the sheet adjustments. Since BigQuery has great OLAP capabailities, it can support this type of analysis without needing more API implementation.
Risks to consider
At the same time, there are risks to consider. Once Ethereum (along with future blockchains) become public, it becomes a lot easier to use BigQuery to track value transactions. While it is much appreciated by private companies and governments, individuals would be quite disappointed and more wary of using cryptocurrency.
Ethereum Future
BigQuery has a great OLAP capabilities. This will allow users to achieve relevant insights from the Ethereum blockchain with rich visuals. Based on this blockchain big data, the Ethereum community can make important decisions. It will allow them to choose whether these analytics show that their network is working on full capacity or not. It indicates whether there needs to be decisions about upgrading.
With this move, Google continues with their user-friendly solutions that cater to all types of companies.