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infrastructures. This applies equally to hardware and software at the technical level and changemanagement at the employee level. 3 Blockchain Typology and Its Usage for Consulting Platforms The use of blockchain technology in connection with online consulting is often discussed in themedicalfield (Hölbl et al. 2018;Agboet al. 2019).However, from the advantages and disadvantages explained in the previous section, it is clear that not all kinds of blockchains are suitable for documenting data of digital consulting platforms in a data protection-compliant manner and thus sufficiently protecting privacy, as thesedatawouldbevisible toeveryparticipantof theblockchain (Pesch and Böhme 2017; Bogdan 2018). Nevertheless, one can distinguish between dif- ferent blockchain types which offer different application possibilities due to their different configuration (Meijer2017;Meier andStormer2018).According toKudra (2018), two essential dimensions are used for this purpose: The ‘access’ dimension: User rights regarding read andwrite rights and the execution of transactions (public vs. private) The ‘validation’dimension:User rights regardingparticipation in theconsensusmechanism (permissionless vs. permissioned) These two dimensions can be combined, allowing four blockchain types to be distinguished and defined (BitFury Group 2015; Kravchenko 2016;Meijer 2017; Carson et al. 2018; Kudra 2018). These are summarised in the following table. Public blockchains are therefore intendedmore for the use by individuals: they retaincontrolover theirpersonaldataandcancarryout transactionsofvariousdata, such as information, financial resources, etc., quickly and cost-effectively without being dependent on a central agency. Private or federated blockchains are pre- destined for private companies and externally segregated, closed groups, which have to limit the activities in their network to a certain groupof people. Theyoffer the efficiency and transparency of blockchain technology in a protected environ- ment that cannot be seen by outsiders. On a private blockchain, access to it—for Table 1 Types of blockchain technology Dimension Validation Permissionless Permissioned Single organisation (single authority blockchain) Consortium (federated blockchain) Access Public Public-permissionless Public-permissioned Public-permissioned Private Private-permissionless Private-permissioned Private-permissioned SourceOwn illustration 110 S. Gerth and L. Heim