In a bid to bolster blockchain ledger technology talent, three Google LLC ex-employees announced on Sunday the formation of GBA, the xGoogler Blockchain Alliance.

The community has been founded by Hitters Xu, Daniel Wang and Andy Tian, the leaders of prominent blockchain projects in China. Its purpose is to bring together current and former employees of Google who are interested in the blockchain industry.

It will serve as a collaborative space for inquiry, dialogue and development regarding blockchain technology. Right now, the use of blockchain ledgers covers a large number of industrial uses from reducing fraud in transport, increasing food safety, efficiently trading financial assets such as stocks and much more.

Hitters Hu founded Nebulas, a next-generation public blockchain infrastructure project, and was employed as part of the Search and Anti-Fraud team at Google. He helped found AntShares, now branded as Neo, a Chinese distributed ledger similar to the second-largest public blockchain. Ethereum. He’s also the former director of Ant Financial’s Blockchain Platform, an affiliate financial arm of Chinese commerce giant Alibaba Group.

“Googlers who are prominent influencers in ‘classic internet’ can play important role in blockchain space,” Hu said about the formation of GBA.

Daniel Wang founded Loopring Foundation, a decentralized open protocol for trading cryptocurrencies. He is the former tech lead at Google and the founder and chief executive officer of Coinport Exchange, a now-shuttered cryptotoken exchange based in Hong Kong known for its “extreme” transparency measures.

Andy Tian founded Gifto Ltd., a blockchain-based decentralized universal gifting protocol. This project allows for the creation and exchange of virtual gifts, built on smart contracts designed to create a consumer-driven virtual economic system. Tian worked as a strategic partnership development manager at Google and was previously general manager of Zynga China.

“Google has always been at the forefront of new technologies worldwide, from Android to AI,” said Tian. “As Googlers, we can bring our unique experiences to expand blockchain’s influence, to everyone, everywhere.”

According to experts on Quora, the blockchain industry is the second-fastest growing skill market in the computer industry. Abhishek Singh, program director at Blockchain Semantics, said there are now 14 job openings for every one blockchain developer and that the median income for blockchain engineers in the U.S. is about $158,000 per year.

“There a tonne of Blockchain related roles that businesses are hiring for,” Singh wrote. “Hiring needs range from leading experts with experience of creating and running distributed ledger systems in production to the developer churning away on the terminal writing hundreds of lines of code every week.”

Through its community and network, GBA plans to incubate high-quality blockchain projects by former Google employees. The community is already highly active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Beijing and Shanghai.

Image: Google