Up nearly 1,000% since March! Is Theta's announcement of Google Cloud joining its network nodes a marketing move or a partnership?

The decentralized video streaming platform Theta Labs announced several positive developments yesterday, including the launch of Mainnet 2.0. In addition, Google Cloud announced its participation as a Theta Enterprise Validator Node, which will assist in transaction verification based on Theta's consensus protocol. Google Cloud has also become Theta's preferred cloud computing platform.

Major Partnerships

Aside from partnering with Google, Theta has corporate validator nodes from Binance, game developer gumi Cryptos, blockchain browser Blockchain.com, and Samsung, with Google becoming the fifth node for Theta.

Allen Day, a developer advocate at Google Cloud, stated:

Distributed ledger technologies are giving rise to new business models and may change the global digital economy, including media and entertainment. We are impressed by Theta's achievements in blockchain video and data delivery. We look forward to being an enterprise validator node and hope to provide the Google Cloud infrastructure to support Theta's long-term vision and future development.

What is Theta?

Theta is a blockchain-based decentralized media distribution network where users can contribute their spare bandwidth and turn their devices into caching nodes on the network. Viewers can access content from nearby caching nodes instead of CDNs, reducing operating costs for video platforms and improving efficiency.

Note: CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. With the proliferation of the internet, web and platform traffic loads have increased, reducing user experience. CDNs establish a new network architecture on the original server to distribute traffic evenly to various servers or nodes, speeding up web browsing performance and effectively distributing traffic, resolving the issue of the "last mile" of data delivery. However, this often comes at a high cost.

Binance also announced yesterday its support for Theta mainnet 2.0 and the launch of 50x THETA/USDT perpetual contracts. Since the crypto market crash in March, the price of THETA has surged nearly 1,000%, from a low of 0.035 to 0.33 USD at the time of writing. Yesterday, the price even reached 0.58 USD briefly, but due to high volatility, Binance announced earlier that it would reduce the leverage ratio to 20x for this trading pair.

The collaboration with Google inevitably draws comparisons to YouTube, the video platform giant owned by Google. Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube and current advisor to Theta, believes that just as YouTube disrupted the traditional video industry in 2005, Theta's innovation will revolutionize current business models.

Strategic Partnership or Marketing Tactic?

There are many "strategic partnerships" in the blockchain industry that turn out to be mere marketing tactics, with the actual nature of cooperation often unclear. Larry Cermak, Director of Research at The Block, offered his candid perspective on the Theta-Google collaboration:

Understand the definition of this partnership—It's with Google Cloud, not Google. Besides using Google Cloud, there is no visible involvement of Google in Theta's operations. This validator node is essentially run by Theta in the name of Google, even the tokens staked for the node are Theta's own, and Google does not hold any Theta tokens.

Yesterday, Larry Cermak raised doubts about the Theta-Google Cloud partnership, but after facing backlash from some blockchain industry insiders (including Theta's official Twitter), he tweeted multiple times today to defend his viewpoint.

It's also noted that the official Twitter account of Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform merely retweeted Theta's announcement without making a separate post. Larry criticized in conclusion: If you can't see through this "bullshit," I don't know what to say. You deserve to lose money; the price is already dropping, and I'm not surprised.