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. 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.
It wasn’t a guarantee that Google would go with Coinbase for the payments portion of the deal. PayPal , for one, offers businesses a way to take payments with digital currencies. “We did look at other companies for the cryptocurrency side of it,” Zavery said. Ultimately, he said, Coinbase had the greatest capability.