This is about the fact that Google cards store Bitcoin cryptocurrencies or how Google is slowly entering the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as the company's payments division struggles to gain significant market share in the payments sector and promotes the addition of asset custody capabilities to its digital cards, Bloomberg has reported.
"Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to," said Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce, according to the information. "As user and merchant demand evolves, we will evolve with it."
According to Bloomberg, Google has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and cryptocurrency payment processor BitPay to enable the new functionality. The executive has said his team is looking for other partnership opportunities, although the company still does not accept bitcoin for transactions.
Google's cryptocurrency integrations allow its customers to hold BTC on their digital cards while spending fiat currency, an agreement that does not precisely use the peer-to-peer asset (networks of nodes that behave like equals to each other) as a medium of exchange but allows users to spend their bitcoin holdings.
Given the astronomical increase in bitcoin's purchasing power over the past decade, it is difficult to conceive of a scenario where bitcoiners want to get rid of some of their BTC, as the opportunity cost of holding it and spending fiat currency directly instead increases.
Google cards store Bitcoin cryptocurrencies
The news comes after the company turned its back on a previous boost in the banking sector in October, hiring former PayPal executive Arnold Goldberg to run its payments division. According to Ready, Google wants to become a "connective tissue" for the entire consumer financial sector.
"We're not a bank, we don't intend to be," Ready told Bloomberg. "Some previous efforts, at times, entered involuntarily into those spaces."
Google's innovation in the cryptocurrency market comes a few weeks after it became known that the reserved quantum technology group of Alphabet (Google's parent company) is preparing to split from the company, according to the source.
Sandbox, often known as Sandbox@Alphabet, was originally created by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and has been run by entrepreneur Jack Hidary for over four years.
Separate from Google's quantum computing team in Santa Barbara, California, United States, Sandbox focuses on software and more experimental quantum projects. It is part of Google's incubator, known as X, although it is considered an independent unit.
Sandbox company and Google cards store Bitcoin cryptocurrencies
Hidary now plans to turn Sandbox into an independent company, according to two people familiar with the matter who have asked not to be identified to discuss their private plans.
Removing Sandbox from Alphabet could give Hidary more freedom to move faster and raise capital outside of Google's walls, according to the sources. "Jack Hidary does what he wants," said one of them. "His spirit is not to waste time."
Token and teh Google cards store Bitcoin cryptocurrencies problem
What is a token?
A digital token is a unit of value based on cryptography and blockchain, issued by a private entity to have a specific functionality in the digital world, with the value that the entity establishes.
It works in an equivalent way to when in the real world we exchange our money for tokens that activate bumper cars, unlock the supermarket cart or allow us to play in a casino.
Thus, a 'token ‘represents a utility or a digital asset that can have very different purposes: it can serve to pay for a job, participate in an’ online' game, carry out a decentralized finance operation (DeFi), prove the possession of the shares of a company or the right to receive its dividends, give access to specific services on a platform or activate a reward in a loyalty program, among many other possibilities.