Blockchain has been evolving for the past few years and considering it from the technological perspective, it has already pushed new boundaries. With each year, the concept that surrounds smart contracts, creative communities and distributed ledgers have matured and the myriad of products that use blockchain technologies have continued to grow. Here in this piece of writing, I will discuss with you the different types of blockchains types in 2024 that you should watch out for.
Blockchain as a service (BaaS)
We all know that blockchain is undoubtedly one of the most revolutionary technologies of this century. It is game changing and plenty of organizations have already started to use their own solutions. Big players in the cloud industry like Microsoft Azure, IBM (BlueMix), AWS (Amazon) have seen the potential benefits of the services in the cloud and has started to provide some BaaS to their clients and has helped them to develop their own blockchain powered product that includes smart contracts, apps, and use some of its other features in various operations and processes. The adoption of this will increase in the year 2024 and it will allow organizations to use the technology to invest in it without worrying.
Public blockchain:
This, as the name suggest means a kind of technology that is meant for the people. No one is in charge and anyone can easily participate in the reading, writing and auditing of it. This type of blockchain is open and transparent and so anyone can review it at a given point of time. But a question that may often arise is that when none is in charge of it, then how are the decisions taken? The answer is that the decision happens by various decentralized consensus mechanism like Proof of Work and Proof of Stake etc.
Private blockchain:
It is a private property of any organization and there is someone who is in charge of it and looks after the important things like read/ write or who can have access to it. Here, the decisions are taken by the central in change who can give mining rights to anyone or not give to all. This makes it centralized where various rights are exercised, but yet it is cryptographically secured and is cost effective for the company.
Federated blockchain
This is also an evolution of the normal blockchain and is best for specific purposes. It tries to remove the autonomy that is vested in one entity by using a private blockchains. Many authorities can control the blockchain and also the pre-select nodes. This selected group of nodes ensures that the block is validated for processing various transactions. It helps to achieve things much faster and you have more than one single point of failures which protects the whole ecosystem when a single point fails.
Ricardian contracts:
Smart contracts have always been the core of many automated dApps, but they have their limitations. It is here that the Ricardian contract comes in. It opens the door to a legal contract that is cryptographically signed and verified. The contract places all the information from a legal document into a format that can be easily executed by a software. Thus, it is both a legal agreement between two parties and also a protocol that integrates the contract securely with a digital infrastructure while offering high levels of security.
Why do we need these blockchain technologies?
After understanding the four different blockchain types, one question that comes to our mind is why do we need them all?
- We no longer can rely totally on huge servers as there may be mishappenings at any time leading to important data loss.
- Blockchain technology helps to reduce the need for trusted parties as we can easily implement smart contracts in place of them.
- They are fast and cost effective at the same time.
- They also offer options for access and right management while leveraging the benefits of the latest technology.
- Even though you are geographically segregated, distributed consensus between the interested parties often becomes faster.
- Blockchain technology also reduces redundant works.
When a business needs privacy and control, consortium and private blockchain technology are a good option, but when we are in need of openness, and censorship resistance, then public blockchains are a must.
