cryptonews.com
Giant Google's platform Google Cloud has partnered with Dapper Labs, the company behind the super-popular non-fungible tokens such as Cryptokitties and NBA Top Shot.
The partnership is said to have been made to support and scale Dapper’s Flow (FLOW) blockchain, Forbes reported.
FLOW, ranked 85th by market capitalization, skyrocketed following the announcement, surpassing USD 24, before correcting below USD 23 again. At 14:42 UTC, it trades at USD 22.71 and is up by 20% in a day, trimming its weekly losses to 12%.
This is meant to be a multi-year partnership, said the report, during which Google Cloud will act as a network operator - it will offer its infrastructure to help Flow scale.
Flow currently supports a number of applications, including the mentioned, popular NFT collections. But with this deal, "more than 2,000 developers building on Flow will be able to connect to Flow access nodes at lower latency through Google’s suite of cloud services," per the report.
The new blockchain-based implementation will run off a network of various kinds of computers across the world - in contrast to the centralized servers powered by Amazon Web Services.
According to the report, during the transition to Web 3.0, this latest move positions Google to go after a chink in Amazon’s armor by branding itself as a developer-friendly alternative.
Google's cloud services do not offer mining cryptocurrency, but Vice President of Google Cloud North America, Janet Kennedy, is quoted as saying that developers will be able to choose regions that power their platforms, based on the regions' energy consumption.
In September 2019, Dapper Labs announced the launch of its Flow for 2020, "as a solution to the problem of blockchain scalability for consumer applications like games and digital collectibles," meant to enable decentralized applications at scale.
Warner Music partnered with the company through the strategic investment announced the same day, while Dapper Labs also announced its partnership with Ubisoft, which is known for developing games like Far Cry, Just Dance, and Assassin's Creed, to serve as an advisor on Flow.
Flow got further reinforcement, with game developer and publisher Animoca Brands as one of the first game companies to build on the blockchain.
Per DappRadar, NBA Top Shot ranks eight among the listed marketplaces, with the 7-day volume of USD 3.01m, down nearly 24%. It is preceded by Foundation with USD 3.03m (-30%), and followed by AtomicMarket with USD 2.47m (-19%).
NBA Top Shot has also seen 35,561 traders over the past week, and 112,891 sales.
Its 24h volume is USD 343,340, up by 15% at the time of writing, while it saw more than 16,000 transactions at the same time.
Among Flow projects, NBA Top Shot ranks first.
In Games section, CryptoKitties currently ranks 83rd, with 110 users in the past 24 hours and 254 transactions, up by 31% and 35%, respectively. Its volume in this period was USD 6,380, down by more than 76%.
Over the past week, it has seen 565 users (-37%), 1,570 transactions (-38%), and USD 164,310 in volume (-98%).