Types Of Blockchain & Their Use Cases

Bitcoin, being the most popular cryptocurrency, started giving blockchain technology the respect it deserved.
With the introduction of Bitcoin to the world, the most popular type of blockchain network was introduced to the market which was the Public Blockchain. Before diving deeper into the types of blockchain networks and their use cases, let us have a look at the broader division of it.
Blockchain technology or network is categorized into 3 broad divisions i.e.:
- Public Blockchain network
- Permissioned or Private Blockchain network
- Federated or Consortium Blockchain network

What is a Public Blockchain Network?
A Public blockchain network or popularly known as the permissionless blockchain network is a network that runs purely on algorithms and is not governed by any organization or a single person.
This network is available for public use and can be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world. It is the public blockchain network where almost all the cryptocurrencies work and are thus available for public use.

Some examples of Public Blockchain networks are Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. where one can access everything related to these cryptos sitting anywhere in the world.
What is a Permissioned or Private Blockchain Network?
This blockchain network is confined to organizations. While using a private blockchain network allows the companies to set controls on who can access the network.

Only the ones who are given access are permitted to use the network otherwise no one outside the organization can access any data in a private blockchain network. A very popular example of a private blockchain network is Oracle.
What is a Federated or Consortium Blockchain network?
Lastly, in this type of blockchain network, the mining process is closely controlled by a selected number of stakeholders who are selected prior to the network launch. No alterations are accepted in the number of stakeholders after the network is launched. Hyperledger is one such type of network where only pre-selected members are allowed to access the data of the network thus, making this network semi-private.
This was a piece of brief information about what are the types of blockchain networks and how they are being used by different people, organizations, etc.
Moving forward, let us discuss what are the use cases of these blockchain networks in different work areas.
Although there are numerous use cases of the blockchain network, a few of them are mentioned below:
1. Capital Markets
Blockchain technology is meant to make work easy for everyone and that is what it helps the capital market with. In the capital markets, blockchain technology helps everyone, from an issuer to an investor and to all the regulators by providing real-time updates in very quick succession. The best part is that Blockchain technology provides more leverage in flexibility and customization than ever before.
In the capital market, if you are an investor you would love to reduce the risk which in turn would give you a greater return. Blockchain technology helps exactly that way by ensuring liquidity which is one of the most important aspects that an investor thinks about before stepping into the capital market.
2. Media And Entertainment Industry
Blockchain technology has various use cases when it comes to the Media and Entertainment Industry for everyone, be it a digital agency, media startup, or even individual content creators.
With blockchain technology coming into the picture, every individual creator can get rid of the contract based licensing as selling their art on the blockchain would allow them to serve peer-to-peer purposes and would neglect the intermediaries for individual artists.
If you are a company that is looking to step into influencer marketing, blockchain technology will help you ensure a better method of payment to all the artists you hire. In the current scenario, companies have to pay the full amount to the artist even if the commercial does not provide a good Return on Investment but, with blockchain technology, a very unique pay-per-use concept can be taken into consideration helping both, the artists and the companies.
3. Sports and E-Sports
NFTs have been the talk of the town in recent times which also marks the arrival of blockchain technology in ESports where gamers can personalize their avatars, win custom NFTs, or some amount of crypto as well. Gen-Z as everyone likes to call it has been very much into online gaming these days and launching these games with some digital assets can be a very good way to incentivize the game and also help the gamers know about the capital markets. These digital assets can be traded within the game or in the real market as well.
Blockchain technology has been continuously leveraging the Esports scene and reports state that the players are loving it as well.
4. Healthcare and Medical Science
A patient’s data and reports are something that cannot be shared in public and should be kept in private among some selected people of the organization. Blockchain technology would help this cause by decentralizing databases and thus allowing only selected people to access that information at the time of use.
Not only the blockchain technology would help in maintaining privacy but it would also help in maintaining the transparency of the drugs, medical supplies, etc. supplied in various parts of the world. Having a decentralized system of the supply chain would allow one to easily check the number of resources supplied at any point in time.
Conclusion:
These were some of the use cases of blockchain technology that are popular in the market and have a huge potential to leverage themselves as well. Blockchain is definitely the future and one should take some time to understand the concept of various things that work over blockchain technology, for example, NFTs, Cryptocurrencies, DAOs, etc. The best thing about blockchain is that it promotes Cryptography, decentralization, transparency, and automation which is why it has become so popular in recent years.