Hopefully, this category is a fairly obvious one—the teacher, student or bank customer are all examples of individual participants. Whether you call them individuals, people, or even humans, this first category is what we would intuitively think of as a participant because we associate them with ourselves.

You might think that individuals are the most important participants in a network. After all, businesses exist to serve individuals, don't they? Well, yes they do, but it's a little more subtle than that. While a business network usually exists to serve the needs of individual end-consumers, blockchain is a technology that is more valuable for the businesses in the network. That's because it allows them to better coordinate their activities with each other, resulting in lower costs, and the opportunity for new goods and services for end-consumers. That's why you'll hear people utter sentences such as Blockchain is more important for B2B than B2C, or C2C—they're trying to communicate that the big win for business networks is to use blockchain as a pervasive fabric for efficient and creative business-to-business interactions.

Of course, individual participants are important. Businesses need to know their end-consumers, and often end-consumers are interacting with each other using the services provided by the business network. For example, if I wish to transfer money to you via a banking network, our respective banks need to know who we both are, so that the transaction can be properly validated and routed.

Finally, it's a fair rule of thumb that there are more individuals known to a business network than there are businesses in the network. Nothing too surprising here—it's just worth pointing this out so that your understanding of what it means to be an individual participant is complete!