Firstly, which participants interact with the blockchain? The first thing to say is that the primary beneficiaries of a blockchain in a business network are the participants that hold the most data, and typically that is organizations. It's not to say that individuals cannot host an instance of the blockchain ledger, but its more likely that they will be interacting with a organization that manages part of the blockchain. Indeed, they may not even know that they are consuming a blockchain. Within an organization, although it is individuals using applications that will be interacting with the blockchain, critically, they will be doing so on behalf of the organization—they are the agents of the organization.

Likewise, when it comes to system and device participants, it's unlikely that devices will host a copy of the blockchain ledger. In this way, devices are a little more like individual participants. In contrast, systems in the network can act either on behalf of an organization, or in some cases, actually represent the organization. What does this mean, that a system represents an organization? Well, if we think about a B2B system, then an organization really does appear to the network as its B2B gateway—for all intents and purposes, the gateway is the organization. It this way, we can see that it would make sense for a large system to be very closely allied to an instance of the blockchain ledger.