Hi @nurseanne84, thanks for commenting and supporting our work.

First off, just to get it out of the way, with the underlying blockchain itself being a transformative power for data transfer, a private blockchain still works more efficiently than other private databases. Of course, control is centralized, but the point of these anyhow is not to create open systems but to supplement a closed system

A blockchain like Bitcoin is a public protocol. A blockchain run by IBM to track their supply chain is a private protocol. These private protocols need not have "nodes" in the traditional sense as they do not require consensus as such. The nodes in this case (IBM) will be their suppliers and other intermediaries. It's kind of like small scale consensus. There's no incentive to mine and their may or may not be a token that it runs on. It may simply be an immutable database for ease of maintaining corporate relations.

Hope this helped you in some way!

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