Blockchain: Public, Private or Hybrid?

Have you ever heard of the differentiation between a Private and Public Blockchain? The difference is an easy one to understand and in many respects, at a very superficial level, mirrors the differentiation between an Intranet and the Internet.

Public Blockchain

The Public Blockchain, is exactly what the name suggests, Blockchain technology that is completely open to the public, namely anyone able and willing to join the network as a participator. A Public Blockchain typically uses some kind of mechanism to incentivize participating parties, which encourages growing numbers of participants in network. One of the best and largest examples of a Public Blockchain is Bitcoin.

In this aspect it is like the Internet, where anyone and everyone can join the open network and participate by creating new content or improving upon already existing ones.

Private Blockchain

A Private Blockchain, just like the Public Blockchain, mirrors the meaning of its linguistic representative. The access to a Private Blockchain will be limited to the parties involved in the creation of that particular network, or those granted access to it by the creating parties. The internal mechanics of a Private Blockchain can vary, from existing participants serving as a type of administrator who decide on the inclusion of future entrants to simple observers, but essentially the Private Blockchain cannot be accessed by the general public.

Some examples of a Private Blockchain include quorum, “an Ethereum-based distributed ledger protocol with transaction/contract privacy and new consensus mechanisms” created by J.P.Morgan (https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum); corda, an open source Blockchain project designed for businesses to transact directly between one another, in strict privacy (https://www.corda.net/); hyperledger, which is an “open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies”. Hyperledger is hosted by The Linux Foundation and includes leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and technology (https://www.hyperledger.org/members)

These massive projects are essentially open to companies operating within specific industries, which allows them to operate relatively undisturbed and out of the limelight.
A third layer of the Blockchain realm, and a relatively unexplored one, is the Hybrid Blockchain.

Hybrid Blockchain

You may have guessed by the flow of this article, that a Hybrid Blockchain may attempt to connect the Private and Public Blockchain. A Hybrid Blockchain should be able to connect public blockchain open to every single person in the world, with a private blockchain, running in a fully permissioned environment, namely limiting the access of available information.

One example of a Hybrid Blockchain is XDC, created by a Singaporean company XinFin, trying to leverage the power of both the public and private blockchains.

While this article is far from being an in-depth look at the different types of blockchain, it should serve as a jumpstart platform for researching further readings in this direction.

Those eager to read more may be interested in following links such as those of Vitalik Buterin ( https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/07/on-public-and-private-blockchains/) or IBM (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference-between-public-and-private-blockchain/) for a more broad discussion of the topic.

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