To date, Google has offered some cloud services to companies working on blockchain technology. But otherwise Google, a company famous for its experimentation, hasn’t launched public projects in the area where some rivals, such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Twitter Inc., have devoted considerable resources.

Google’s payments and commerce president, however, recently said the company pays “a lot of attention to crypto.”

Read more on Google’s move to overhaul its fintech, crypto effort

Last fall, Google placed the groups working on its virtual reality hardware and software efforts into Labs under Clay Bavor, a vice president, who also oversees the company’s startup incubator. At the time, Google described Bavor’s work as focusing on “long-term technology projects that are in direct support of our core products and businesses.” The unit working on blockchain is relatively small compared with Google’s other product areas, said a person familiar with the company.

Venkataraman, a veteran of Google’s search advertising team, has previously published research on the company’s techniques for distributed computing, or tying large numbers of machines together in networks.