Google Starting 2023 Will Rely on Coinbase to Allow Crypto Payments

Starting in early 2023 tech giant, Google will now rely on Coinbase to allow a subset of customers to pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies.

“Google will allow many more customers to make payments with cryptocurrency,” Amit Zavery, Vice President and General Manager and Head of Platform at Google Cloud confirmed the new development.

Google had previously indicated in May that it was exploring the possibility of adding support for payments with digital currencies. Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s vice president of business development said Coinbase had been in discussion with Google for months, with conversations about supporting commerce transactions, cloud usage, and the Prime service all happening in parallel. “We then decided to bring them together,” he said.

The deal announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference might succeed in luring cutting-edge companies to Google in a fierce, fast-growing market, where Google’s top competitors do not currently permit clients to pay with digital currencies.

The terms of the deal however weren’t disclosed. But like other Coinbase Commerce arrangements, Coinbase will earn a percentage of transactions that go through it, Migdal confirmed.

The cloud business helps diversify Google parent Alphabet away from advertising, and it now accounts for 9% of revenue, up from less than 6% three years ago, as it is expanding more quickly than Alphabet as a whole.

Coinbase, which generates a majority of its revenue from retail transactions, will move data-related applications to Google from the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud, which Coinbase has relied on for years, said Migdal.

Zaver said that the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service will initially accept cryptocurrency payments from a handful of customers in the Web3 World who want to pay with cryptocurrency, thanks to an integration with the Coinbase Commerce Service.

Google is also exploring how it can use Coinbase Prime, a service that securely stores organizations’ cryptocurrencies and allows them to execute trades.