Google’s APAC Web3 Team Gets Indian-Origin Rishi Ramchandani as Lead: Details

Google is adding new members to its Web3 team, deployed in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. In the latest appointment, the tech major has roped-in Rishi Ramchandani to lead its Web3 APAC team. The Indian origin techie was previously working at BlockFi, the digital asset lender that filed for bankruptcy in November this year. Ramchandani’s appointment was officially announced on Thursday, December 22. Despite the ongoing crypto slump, Google is focussing on finetuning its global Web3 teams.

Ramchandani confirmed his hiring in Google’s Web3 team in a LinkedIn post after Mitesh Agarwal, the Managing Director – Google Cloud Customer, Partner Engineering and Web3 team, congratulated the newly appointed.

“Excited for the next step in my career! I look forward to growing Google Cloud’s Web3 efforts in APAC and working with the great people there,” he wrote.

The search engine giant has been exploring opportunities to delve deeper into the crypto and Web3 sectors.

In October, Google and Coinbase revealed plans for a strategic partnership, which would allow select customers to pay for the cloud services using crypto from early 2023.

At the time, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, had said that Google aims to make building in Web3 faster and easier.

In fact, Alphabet, the parent of Google has invested a whopping sum of $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 11,910 crore) in the blockchain industry, a Blockdata analysis had claimed back in August.

As for Ramchandani, the move marks a significant milestone after he suffered the blow of the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange that shook up the overall crypto market and left his previous company BlockFi high and dry.

BlockFi had at the time said that the liquidity crisis was caused due to its exposure to FTX via loans. In a court filing, BlockFi listed its assets and liabilities as being between $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,170 crore) and $10 billion (roughly Rs. 81,700 crore).