Ethereum's blockchain is made publicly available on Google BigQuery, including ETH transfers and transaction costs, after Bitcoin's was added in February
Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have captured the imagination of technologists, financiers, and economists.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands five months after sources told Bloomberg that Google was building blockchain-related technology for its cloud business, including a distributed ledger for verifying transactions — and two months after BigQuery quietly took on the Bitcoin dataset in February. Adding Ethereum makes it two major public blockchains queryable as ordinary SQL tables.
The significance is that Google is treating chain data as just another BigQuery workload, riding infrastructure it had already hardened with cost controls and audit logs back in 2015. It is the first concrete productization of what had been rumor, and the opening move in a blockchain push that later produced the Blockchain Node Engine and, much further out, the Universal Ledger testnet.
First-order effects
- Analysts and developers can now run SQL directly over ETH transfers and transaction costs without operating an Ethereum node themselves, making gas-cost and flow analysis a pay-per-query exercise inside existing BigQuery budgets.
Second-order effects
- Other smart-contract platforms become candidates for the same dataset treatment, and rival cloud analytics providers face pressure to match public-ledger availability or cede crypto research workloads to Google Cloud.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — datasets first, then node management, then a proprietary ledger — Google Cloud moves from hosting blockchain data to selling blockchain infrastructure itself, with the Universal Ledger as the end state of that ladder.
The trend: Cloud providers are climbing from passive blockchain datasets toward full blockchain infrastructure offerings, with Google using BigQuery as the entry point.