Google Cloud is hiring a legion of blockchain experts to expand its business

Google’s cloud division has formed a group to build business around blockchain applications, following efforts to grow in retail, health care and other industries.

Success could help Google further diversify away from advertising and become more prominent in the growing market for computing and storage services delivered from remote third-party data centers.

The cloud group plans to hire a slew of people with blockchain expertise. We think that if we do our jobs right, it will drive decentralization.

Google’s cloud marketplace already offers tools developers can tap to start building blockchain networks, and it has blockchain customers, including Dapper Labs, Hedera and Theta Labs, along with exchanges. Google also offers data sets that people can explore with the BigQuery service to view transaction history for bitcoin and other currencies.