A recent report from Bloomberg suggests that Google Labs is in the process of setting up a new unit dedicated to blockchain. Shivakumar Venkataraman, a longtime Google employee in the advertising division, took over leadership of the blockchain task force.
A new unit dedicated to blockchain at Google
Shivakumar Venkataraman said that “Cryptocurrency is a subject to which we pay a lot of attention”. This new unit will therefore see the light of day under the nascent division called “Google Labs”. It welcomes long-term projects with high potential. Like artificial intelligence and 5G, blockchain is a technology that is most often used to enthrall investors and consumers.
Amazon and Meta are spending record sums to maintain their lobbying
With Google, that may not be the case. The American giant could rely on this new unit to restore Google Pay (3% market share). Arnold Goldberg, former senior executive at PayPal, has just take the direction of the payment service which is struggling to exist alongside Apple Pay (92% market share) and Samsung Pay (5% market share). Blockchain could give Google Pay a new lease of life by developing a cryptocurrency. This is a hypothesis that is currently on the table internally.
Google Pay in freefall?
This Google product is certainly the one that has suffered the worst downturn in 2021. After abandoning Plex, Google Pay teams launched a new application later this year. An app originally developed for India, radically different from the old Google Pay app used in the United States. The new app uses a phone number for identification instead of a Google account, which means a ton of features US users have come to expect are no longer supported…
A month after the grand launch in the United States, the director of Google Pay has jumped ship, leaving US users with a disastrous app and major feature regressions. Following this sinking, dozens of employees and managers also left: seven team leaders and half of the people working in the commercial team. So there is everything to rebuild on the Google Pay side and Arnold Goldberg intends to rely on the new division dedicated to the blockchain to achieve this.