What are the different types of Blockchains?

There mainly three types of Blockchains that have emerged after Bitcoin introduced Blockchain to the world.

1. Public Blockchain
2. Private Blockchain
3. Consortium or Federated Blockchain

1. Public Blockchain

A public blockchain as its name suggests is the blockchain of the public, meaning a kind of blockchain which is-‘ for the people, by the people and of the people’

Here no one is in charge and anyone can participate in reading/writing/auditing the blockchain. Another thing is that these types of blockchain are open and transparent hence anyone can review anything at a given point of time on a public blockchain.

2. Private Blockchain

Private blockchain as its name suggests is a private property of an individual or an organization.

Unlike public blockchain here there is an in charge who looks after of important things such as read/write or whom to selectively give access to read or vice versa.

Here the consensus is achieved on the whims of the central in-charge who can give mining rights to anyone or not give at all.

3. Consortium or Federated Blockchain

This type of blockchain tries to remove the sole autonomy which gets vested in just one entity by using private blockchains.

So here instead of one in charge, you have more than one in charge. Basically, you have a group of companies or representative individuals coming together and making decisions for the best benefit of the whole network. Such groups are also called consortiums or a federation that’s why the name consortium or federated blockchain.

For example, let suppose you have a consortium of world’s top 20 financial institutes out which you have decided in the code that if a transaction or a block or decision is voted/verified by more than 15 institutes then only it should get added to the blockchain.

So it is a way of achieving thing much faster and you also have more than one single point of failures which in a way protects the whole ecosystem against a single point of failure.