Tools for Ethereum on Google Cloud - Benjamin J. Richter

Transcript

[Music] So uh this was a very nice panel but now we going to introduce the next speaker with uh presentations about tools for Ethereum on Google cloud. Uh please welcome Benjamin Richtor. Uh he is a custom engineer at Google cloud. Benjamin is helping digital native companies to solve the challenges of tomorrow. While while he's fascinated by all products of the Google Cloud Platform, he has a special interest in blockchain technologies. Please welcome Benjamin Deui. Thank you so much. Uh, do I get a clicker? I guess I find it here.

Uh, yes. All right. So, I see the timer ticking. Maybe we can wait until the room fills up. Or maybe that's going to take too long, I guess, after 3 days of conference. uh or even longer with all these site events happening before and after. Uh it's my pleasure being here and uh yes, as it has already been said, I want to talk to you about some stuff that Google can how Google can help you build uh on Ethereum or other protocols in the web 3 space. So without further ado, um as yeah, my name is Benjamin. I lead our web 3 efforts uh across EMIA.

Um, so maybe you've uh seen me at some other event or will see me at some other uh events as well. And I'm happy to also chat afterwards a little bit about any idea that you have where maybe Google can help you with your with your own project. And there's a few areas that I want to cover today. So first of all, you might be surprised to see a uh big player of the web two world speak at a web 3 conference. So, I want to hopefully remove some doubts about it and make it more clear um why there's actually a good fit. And this goes down into like three specific solutions that hopefully will be helpful if you're building on Ethereum. And then also beyond that at the end, I want to show you a little bit um what we can do to

support your own project. So, web 3 at Google and Google Cloud is a longer story because uh you might have heard of Google. It's this little search engine. Maybe you're familiar with this uh interface. But even though it looks simple by design, there is actually a lot more to it. So, behind the like simplistic interface, there's a lot of effort uh that's going on to make it so fast. so reliable and also so simplistic. Um so much so that we since the existence of Google which has been like more than 25 years now um have been working really

hard to uh build a global infrastructure that can power products with up to or even more than a billion users. So we have like again these slides I have to probably update every week but by now we have at least nine distinct products that have more than 1 billion users and when we meet today here in Prague and at similar conferences and we talk about like this next iteration of web web 3 and how blockchain adoption hopefully will we just heard it on the panel like maybe at 2030 how the world will look like. Um, one thing I think we can all agree on is that we want to see more users being active in the space. And so I think one piece to the puzzle that

Google can help solve would be to scale technology for such a huge amount of people like every human on earth basically that we can serve and integrate for every human on earth. And uh this technology of course evolves around uh data centers and connecting these data centers with subc cables. And any whatever your idea of web 3 and blockchain is at the very core of it are these um uh validators and nodes depending on the protocol whatever name they have but these are computers that are connected with each other and they use a specific protocol to do this communication. But one level lower there's always going to be hardware required. We will always need subc

cables and we will always need scalable computing data centers and technology to power whichever blockchain it will be whichever dub you are going to build and that I personally really believe this is something we can help to solve because we have a lot of experience and this is not like something anyone else can do overnight to set up this infrastructure and even though the Google cloud platform itself is an ever growing uh ecosystem of tools which I think this meant to be confusing. I can't even like tell you every little icon and logo what it stands for. So, what I'm here for today is kind of to point out two or three things that might be interesting to you if you want to build on Google or what if you want to build in general.

Maybe these tools are exactly the missing piece or which brings you a headache developing your own application or your own project. And the very first of these um solutions is called blockchain analytics and it started out in 2018. So whatever you call an OG in the crypto space, 2018 is pretty close to that kind of starting point. And um even though it was kind of a side project uh among kind of interested employees of Google, we worked together with some third parties like EF, the Ethereum Foundation to index certain protocols and put the entire chain history into a uh database which makes it easier to analyze and also combine it

with other data sets that either a specific like you might be like have collected this data yourself or other third party data sets that you might to want to use to come up to insights that are really helpful. And the cool thing which I'm really proud of is we do this for a variety of data sets and data set types. So really it starts from weather data. it start goes beyond uh for example taxis in New York how they move how many kilometers each passenger travels and bigquery sorry blockchain data sets is just one of them but it's actually the most popular one and I think just this tells a lot that people in in our space here we really care about uh data and um and proof and

datadriven decisions and an easiest I would say one of the easiest way to read uh data onchain is via these data sets and um even though we started early in 2018, for the longest time we would rely on third party um partnerships or organizations to index the data and we would just host a copy. But we kind of took a next step and developed from there and uh recently like about one and a half years ago uh we started indexing some of the protocols ourselves. So we have a dedicated engineering team that not only builds these indexers at Google quality but we can also now provide service level agreements for these data sets. And this means that if someone

reads data blockchain data from the data set they have a guarantee a contractual guarantee that this data is up to date like it's never older than a certain amount of blocks that it's complete that there's no blocks missing or no transaction missing. And it's also accurate. That means that we um make sure that certain file formats uh will be already transferred. So it makes it easier to connect it with more common file formats or um storage formats that you might see in in other non-crypto or blockchain data sets. I think it says on the slide it went into general availability in 2023 in December. So I think it's one and a half years by now.

And here's a little bit of a list um on what data sets we have. This again slide is kind of ends here at the bottom. It looks like it's cut off. It is because the list is actually a lot longer. But what I wanted to highlight is um even though we have more data sets and more protocols indexed, only a subset of them is where Google is the maintainer and the product has the same guarantees that I just spoke about. But you might see there is already Ethereum mainet and it doesn't even have the preview tag attached to it. And that means you have these contractual guarantees that the data is correct. And maybe for your own project, you don't care about it so much. You're maybe still experimenting.

But if you are a bigger organization that builds products around it, you have to rely on the accurate and complete data sets. And that's why I believe it's a good thing that we contribute to this development and the ecosystem in a way by providing these data sets. Um so yeah like this one idea when it comes to reading data from chain and when it comes to not just reading but also sorry this one example actually I forgot about it you can do it with SQL and if you don't speak SQL you can also ask Gemini or another LLM of your choice to help you write this code. There's actually some tools integrated in BigQuery that can help you write natural language questions and translate them into SQL

code that can help you to get insights out of the data. And yeah, like just a few like the cool example that um you can see like you can actually check for yourself how fresh the data is and kind of query the latest block and compare it with Ether Scan and check how long ago that block was minted. Uh all right, let's move on. So, of course, reading data is kind of only one piece to the equation. You might also want to be interested in writing and properly interacting with the blockchain. And it might not come as a surprise to you that RPC is kind of the standard interface by now for most blockchain protocols and surely for Ethereum to um not only read but also write to the chain. So every type of

decentralized application at some point probably relies on RPC as an interface to interact with the blockchain. And that's really good because if you would have to host your own node for whatever interaction you want to do, it can be challenging to update the node, maintain it and uh also uh scale the node. If you really have a lot of users or even if you have don't have a lot of users, you have this whole node running that you don't really need. So it's really like this cool feature what RPC can solve for and we built an RPC service that is autoscaling as I just said. Um so if you have a huge influx in users which we hope to see all of us together um we would be able to scale this what I said

initially up to a billion or like there's no limit to how many users and please challenge me on that like if you can break this tool by having too many users I would love that to like to see that and fix it for you but I'm quite confident we have a really scalable solution out there it's also highly available we make sure the um the same like other all the other Google products with a extreme extremely high availability, this RPC service will remain available to you. And the goal is to integrate with more chains. Um the Q4 on the slide here was initially meant for Q4 of last year, but unfortunately it's uh kind of still true for this year. There's a bit of a shift in our strategy. Happy to uh tell you more a

little bit after. Um but the idea is to uh we are aware there is Ethereum but it's not the only protocol and maybe like whatever you're building it might not even live on Ethereum so hopefully have some answers there for you to make your life easier as well and uh maybe just one more thing because um users are global so also our endpoints um can exist in multiple regions I think actually on the next slide we have uh just going to skip one you see there's one in Europe and one in Asia and of course one in in US central um the slide that I skipped Just to make sure it's I didn't skip too much. These are just some inspirations what you can use the RPC service for. I probably don't have to tell you about it. Um you can use it to deploy smart contracts or um just

like for relaying transaction or even building your own indexer um or reading from the chain in real time. As I said, Ethereum is in this public preview. Um that means it's completely free to use. So kind of you have nothing to lose to give it a try. and uh be kind of support quite a lot of requests per second. We believe it's the most performant RPC service out there. Again, feel free to challenge us on this. And if you need more than what's covered in this like free tier, we can also take a look. Um there should be a way for us to make more uh either transactions per second or transactions per day. I think there's another limit available to you. That's exactly what I'm here for. Find me for it or text me after. Um all right, we

spoke about reading data. We sp about right writing data to the chain but uh before you even use mainet you might want to test a few things out and I think this is a really cool testament that we can um help you with this as well and not only me telling you about it but also I can show you proof uh that this is something people like using. So we launched this portal. The portal is a summary where we highlight all these solutions that Google has in the web 3 space to make it easier for people to find them. If you Google Google web3 portal, you will also find it actually the most used uh domain or like subdomain side of our cloud offering

which I'm also really proud of saying. So we have a lot of attention in the web 3 space and people come to us for help and I'm happy that there is something there now that they can that they can find and one element of this you see it already on the left is a faucet for test nets and uh on the Ethereum side we support Solia and Holleski we actually work like super closely with the Ethereum DevOps guys to make sure these faucets don't dry out and this is not always easy which I also think is super good to see that there is such a high demand. I think I was joking with someone and it's not actually a joke.

There was even some at some point the test net tokens there was a value attached to them because they were so scarce. People were willing to pay for test net tokens. But it doesn't end at Ethereum. You can see there's like more and we will keep adding other test nets because it's um or like other faucets because even faucets it sounds like okay you just give stuff away for free. How hard can it be? you might want to still monitor um who you give it to and which amounts and what they do with it and um so if you are not building on Ethereum but want to learn more about it how you can integrate with us also find me afterwards and as I said I don't want to you to just trust my word I mean we all believe in a trustless ecosystem so it

shouldn't be just about me telling you something you should see the proof and you can see it for yourself so this is onchain data if you take a look on which faucet most test net tokens were retrieved from uh we did a silent launch at the middle of last year and within a few months we actually saw a re huge influx in people uh preferring our faucet over others and I don't only say this to brag actually that's not my intention I'm saying this because I think it shows whatever the brand of Google and the kind of big trust and reputation Google has whatever we can do to foster the ecosystem and maybe bring not only make life easier for existing

web 3 developers but also bring more people over that have maybe never touched web 3 technology. I'm really glad to see this and maybe it could be something as simple as okay the the test net token should just be one click away and we if we can help with that happy to do it. All right. Um see another cool thing I think I skipped a slide here I didn't. Maybe I should have put that one. um is what we do in this AI space. So on the portal already live is an experimental feature where we use the kind of experience that we have with building LLMs and training them and tuning them to give specific answers um about either explaining things that

happen onchain or helping you write solidity smart contracts or other languages. And one thing we of course you if you are familiar with LLMs they are usually as good as the data they've been trained on. And it's I'm glad to say and we are here together is this like conference is in the like spirit of Ethereum specifically that of course a lot of data out there is kind of leaning towards Ethereum. So any general LLM is probably pretty good at giving you answers for Ethereum because that's kind of a lot of data to train it with. But we also um trying to expand this to more like to other protocols and don't like we don't want to lock anyone out like we are kind of open for to the technology and the protocol itself. But uh yeah it

can be a bit intimidating for someone. I mean no human can actually understand this transaction hash just by looking at it. But maybe we can make it easier for people to get into it or just faster for you even if you're like a veteran to get the information you need. And then the same way I hope I have another slide I don't to when it comes to writing a smart contract um and troubleshooting it or just even automating certain tasks. All right, that's all on the product side on like tools that are available and this is ever expanding. So um please take a look. I think the portal is a really good starting point to kind of keep up to date. You will see like some events that we are present and now I want to just shift a little bit the focus beyond tooling. I mean even

though the the call or the the talk is called tools for Ethereum, there's a bit more that we can do beyond uh providing you with like programming tools, we also have a startup program and the startup program has three pillars. I'm going to take a look. So the one pillar would be financial support because uh yeah, even at the end of the day things cost money. So we can hopefully help to reduce the cost or remove it for certain elements of whatever you're building on. We also have technical support. That means um maybe you are the expert for this specific little project and the problem that you're trying to solve, but there are some areas that you might not know so well and these ones maybe we can bring in expertise and help you solve

them. So you can focus on this one area that you are really like working on. And then eventually you also care about users and users can be of course private people but also maybe customers or or companies you want to work with. And also there I think we have a lot of experience um on how to make sure to offer like something that's attractive for these users and maybe give you feedback on on your business plan and uh the way it works. So just kind of going through the three pillars um there is the the credit program. So if you want to use Google cloud um tools and this does is not limited to those that I presented. It's also basic infrastructure. So compute, storage, networking, AI. Um we have a lot of um credits for this. Actually, if you are

building with AI, it's not on the slide. We can give you even more credits because AI can get quite expensive pretty quickly. So yeah, take a look. There's a specific program for for AI as well. And then on the business or sorry, the next one I think is technical support. Um we have also a strong ecosystem. So even if it is protocol specific or blockchain specific questions you might have, we have a really like big ecosystem of partners um that we can make introductions to or connect you to if you need the specific support. And once you're part of our startup program, you also get lots of actual benefits from from these parties as well. You see a few of them here on the on the on the slide. And I think the

if I yeah then the technical support I think I already mentioned that we can also have live like 247 support if your product goes down which is actually really valuable like in just this alone would cost usually um $12,000 and you just get it for free where you have a Google engineer uh reviewing your code and helping you out. I think the shortest SLAs is within 15 minutes. So that can be really helpful if you're stuck and Gemini doesn't have the answer. there's still an actual human that can help you with it. Um, another piece of it is if you are part of the program, you will also join our web 3 community. So, by now we have had I think 1,600 projects going through this program and some of them have been there

many years ago. So they have already they're way further ahead now down the road map and down the road on becoming an a company and then a proper product and they can also give you like coaching and and and and help you maybe if you get stuck at a certain stage or just have a question or need an intro to someone in the ecosystem. There's really this community. It literally it says it's like a discord channel and also lots of events that we can get you tickets to and connect you with people. And then lastly, so it's really this ecosystem um that kind of helping each other. So if you are a startup, uh come and find find us. If you're an accelerator and I think

the s kind of got tired and and already dropped down one line. Um but we also connect you um to this internal community of Google experts and events. I think everything on this slide I already mentioned. I think there's one more piece. Um these are some of the partners. Hopefully some logos look familiar and there's way more um is yeah like ever changing, ever growing. And maybe lastly the the if you are part of the program um you also get someone who's a dedicated point of contact and that's actually very rare like only usually the largest companies um have a dedicated point of contact within Google. Um so being part of the startup program you really get like a

white glove treatment that someone like myself can be your advocate within our large organization to make product integrations with Google tools possible or as I said before make your introductions help you out get feedback and that's quite valuable. I personally think that's can be really helpful and the the one thing I wanted to highlight what makes the web 3 startup program special. So we did have a startup program for a longer time but the issue was often that web 3 startups can be funded and in bit of like un inconventional ways and for the first time now we also allow um projects that have been token funded or into the program. Previously you needed a

approved investor to kind of already have invested in you so that we would then trust their judgment to also onboard you into the program. And that's what I personally think uh really cool about the web 3 program is that if you have other forms of funding, it's not a blocker anymore to be excluded from the program. And uh if you do apply, and I think I have the link somewhere on another slide. I hope I didn't completely mix up my the order of things. Um here it is. The QR code on the left is for the program, but of course you can also Google it. Um if you do get stuck, you can use the QR code on the right. Please shoot me a message.

I'll try my very best to uh get you through or give you some feedback on what might be causing it or what might be missing for you to get access to the program. And also please share this with your friends. Like it's not only I mean really glad you all showed up and and joined the talk today, but um of course in a decentralized world you don't have to show up in person to to benefit from this. I think that's it from my end. I'll leave this slide on a little bit longer if you hadn't had a chance to to capture the links. And as I said before um yeah like find me here now after the talk or reach out to me at any time maybe it becomes more relevant to you at a later stage if you want to learn more uh what we are working on and how we can

help you. Thank you so much for showing up. [Music]