It was only six months ago that Google began accepting ads for cryptocurrency wallets, loosening a 2-year-old crypto ban that had only allowed a few well-regulated exchanges onto its ad platform.
Now, it’s building a new blockchain division and teaming up with crypto firms including the Coinbase exchange and payment processor BitPay to add crypto payment capabilities to its digital debit cards.
Read more: Bitcoin Payments Will Boom in 2022 as Crypto Reaches an Inflection Point
According to Bloomberg, the move into digital cards comes in the wake of the search and advertising giant’s decision to abandon a push into finance proper, killing off plans to work with banks, including Citigroup, to offer checking and savings accounts.
It’s part of a strategy to team up with providers of “a wider range of financial services, including cryptocurrencies,” Google President of Commerce Bill Ready told Bloomberg Wednesday (Jan. 19).
The move comes as Google adds more payment features to its search and shopping offerings as it refocuses on its role as an intermediary, Ready said, per the report.
“Our aim is to help create connections,” he told Bloomberg. “We’re not a conflicted party.”
Instead, Google’s focus is on giving users a view of “the entire array of financial services out there,” Ready said in the report.
More broadly, it’s part of a move to add more payments features to its search and shopping features, which included Wednesday’s hiring of PayPal vet Arnold Goldberg to run its payments division.
That meshes with what the company said in October, when it killed off the Citi demand deposit account (DDA) offerings.
“… [T]here’s consumer demand for simple, seamless and secure digital payments for online and in-store transactions,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg in a separate report at the time. “We’re updating our approach to focus primarily on delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services.”
That includes cryptocurrency services, Ready said Wednesday. The Coinbase-BitPay deal will lead to digital debit cards that allow customers to spend bitcoin and other digital assets at the point of sale (POS), while the merchant receives payment in traditional fiat currency.
See also: Mastercard, Coinbase Make It Easier to Buy NFTs
“Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” Ready told Bloomberg. “As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.”
Metaverse Aspirations?
On the blockchain front, Google parent Alphabet announced the hiring of Shivakumar Venkataraman to run a new unit focusing on “blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies,” Bloomberg also reported separately Wednesday.
He will kickstart its new Google Labs division, which also includes its various virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects. The blockchain division will be small in comparison to the other parts of Labs.
Read also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?
Still, that’s a combination that makes it hard not to see Labs as a perfect spot for Google’s metaverse ambitions, which it has been working on for years.
The virtual worlds took a big leap into the mainstream consciousness last year when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he was changing the company’s name to Meta, adding that he saw the future of social media housed in a metaverse.
That’s a direction blockchain companies are aggressively purposing, seeing decentralized projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox as the perfect platform for metaverses not dominated by Big Tech.
Zuckerberg’s firm is not the only tech giant diving into the metaverse. Microsoft announced Tuesday (Jan. 18) a $69 billion agreement to buy Activision Blizzard, a leading game developer.
See more: Is the Metaverse Gaming, Commerce or Escapism?
Among other things, Microsoft pitched the deal as a way to “provide building blocks for the metaverse. That’s something Walmart recently revealed it’s pursuing
Read more: Walmart Meets Meta in the Metaverse
With Google, Facebook and Microsoft onboard, investors are asking an obvious question The Wall Street Journal reported about last week: Where’s Apple?
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