The latest collaboration also sees Flare join the Google for Startups Cloud Program, giving developers on the platform a shot at gaining financial and technical help from Google Cloud partners.
Flare, the blockchain for data, is welcoming Google Cloud as an infrastructure provider, joining the blockchain as the latest network validator and contributor to its Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO), built on the Flare network. Google Cloud will propose and validate new blocks on the Flare network, enhancing security and supporting the chain’s proof of stake consensus mechanism.
The latest collaboration brings the total number of infrastructure providers on Flare to over 100, all acting as validators and contributors to FTSO. These infrastructure providers, Google Cloud included, aim to support Flare in securing the platform’s highly decentralized price oracle, FTSO, providing platforms and DApps on Flare with publicly available pricing data. This places FTSO among the most decentralized and reliable oracles in the Web 3 space.
Showing his excitement about collaborating with one of the world’s largest cloud computing services, Hugo Philion, Co-Founder and CEO of Flare, explained the shared vision between the two companies, stating:
“As the blockchain for data, we are excited that Google Cloud is joining our existing decentralized network of infrastructure providers who contribute to Flare. Our work together will help deliver a more robust decentralized smart contract platform that places decentralized data at its core.”
Having partnered with several infrastructure providers in the past, including Ankr, Figment, Restake, and NorthStake, Flare’s mission is to provide DApps on Flare and other chains with high-quality access to decentralized data. Some of the data shared across Flare’s FTSO include price and time series data, blockchain event and state data, and Web2 API data.
“Data access at scale is important to increase relevant blockchain use cases and greater global adoption of the technology,” James Tromans, Head of Web3, Google Cloud stated. “Google Cloud becoming a validator on the Flare network will help support that mission.”
The current utility model of blockchain applications is heavily reliant on external data, which requires oracles to fetch this data for decentralized computation. However, as Philion explains, the existing oracles systems “suffer from meaningful drawbacks they are hard to decentralize, expensive to use, difficult to scale, and have high latency”. Flare aims to reduce these drawbacks via a dual-role approach.
“Because Flare’s oracles are built into the structure of the network, we are the only smart contract platform optimized for decentralized data acquisition and can give developers all the data they need to build new, more relevant use cases beyond financial speculation,” he further explains.
Simply, Flare brings together low-cost EVM smart contracts with decentralized data, giving developers and users trustless access to the broadcast range of data. Flare’s oracles are built to provide users with high scalability and low latency and are provided at minimum cost. This is achieved by utilizing the validators of the network to provide decentralized data to applications as part of a decentralized native Oracle system.
By being widely efficient, Flare provides developers with more room to expand their platforms and DApps, expanding the utility of blockchain. Developers get the much-needed decentralized data to build new use cases for their platforms, further enhancing blockchain adoption. Additionally, Flare Labs, the sister company to Flare, also provides developers and users with trust-minimizing bridging technology (FAssets), for smart contract and non-smart contract assets, providing decentralized applications with access to external tokens including Bitcoin, XRP and Dogecoin. This brings new users and value to Flare as part of a vertically integrated blockchain for data.
Finally, Flare also became part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, a program aiming to accelerate the growth and development of Web 3 startups. The partnership will give developers on Flare access to financial and technical support from Google Cloud and partners.
