Types of Blockchain

Blockchains are generally grouped into four types based on who can join the network and who controls it:

Public blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum) are permissionless: anyone can read the ledger, submit transactions, and run a validating node. Security comes from broad, open participation, but throughput and governance can be harder to coordinate at scale.

Private blockchains restrict participation to a single organization, which controls who can read data and validate transactions. They offer speed and control but sacrifice the decentralization and censorship-resistance that make public chains valuable.

Consortium blockchains sit between the two: a pre-selected group of organizations jointly controls validation (common in supply chain and financial-services consortia), balancing shared trust with more limited, permissioned membership than a public chain.

Hybrid blockchains combine elements of public and private models -- for example, a public settlement and trust layer paired with permissioned or enterprise-facing application layers -- to balance openness, performance, and compliance requirements.

Autheo is best understood as a hybrid, layered architecture rather than fitting a single category. Autheo Layer 1 is a public, permissionless trust and settlement layer secured by Proof of Autheo, a hybrid PoA/PoS consensus model open to any operator who holds an Autheo NFT License and meets the staking threshold. Sitting on top of Layer 1, Autheo's Layer-0 OS coordinates a distributed mesh of compute, storage, and edge infrastructure -- contributed by independently owned providers -- into what behaves like one logical cloud, with the developer platform exposing it through familiar APIs, SDKs, and CLI tools. Enterprises can also build permissioned appchains or workloads on top of this shared public trust layer, giving them consortium- or private-style control over their own application layer while still inheriting the security of the shared Layer 1. This layered design lets Autheo offer the openness of a public trust layer without forcing every participant or workload into a single governance model.