Every page so far has been about mechanism. This one is about people: who needs what has been described, at which moment they need it, and — no less important — whether they can use it yet.

The nine audiences fall into four groups by their relationship to a chain: those who build one, those who keep it alive, those who verify it, and the end users. Each table below has the same four columns, and the last is the honest one: which level unlocks it for them.

⚠️ This order follows who can use it first, not who matters most. The project positions itself as a multi-chain blockchain network belonging to everyone, yet "everyone" sits in the last two rows and cannot use it yet. That is not an oversight — it is the order of the road: organisations pay first, and it is that money which funds the distance to individuals. Individuals come last because putting them first would be selling something that does not exist. But to say it fully: if that distance is never covered, the positioning is only a phrase.

Diagram

flowchart TB N1["LEVEL 1 · It runs"] --> N2["LEVEL 2 · Open to outsiders"] N2 --> N3["LEVEL 3 · Real self-service"] N3 --> N4["LEVEL 4 · Real assets"] N1 -.- P1["1 · Asset issuers 2 · Fintechs and tokenisation firms 6 · Auditors 7 · Regulators"] N2 -.- P2["3 · Multi-party consortia 4 · Validator operators 5 · Customer-side operations teams"] N3 -.- P3["8 · Individuals"] N4 -.- P4["9 · AI agents and EVERY other audience once real value is touched"]

Figure 16 — The nine audiences placed on the maturity ladder. The further down, the further away.

Those who build a chain

#	Audience	The moment they need 9Chain	Answered by	Unlocks at level
1	Asset issuers — funds, certificate issuers, stablecoin issuers	When a regulator asks "prove that only approved wallets can receive this asset" — and the answer cannot be "our contract checks it"	The compliance gate inside consensus, beneath a contract's reach	1 to trial · 4 to touch real assets
2	Fintechs and tokenisation firms	When the task is to ship a product, and the first quote received is a six-month infrastructure project	A chain raised from a declaration; the lifecycle already encoded	1
3	Multi-party consortia — several institutions on one ledger	When the second party asks "why should we trust your servers?" and the third party will ask exactly the same	Multi-party mode; a threshold stopping anyone from holding more than a third of voting power	2 — because each member must be able to run a node

These three are the demand already proven with money in Context: it is precisely the absence of such a place that forced the largest institutions to build their own infrastructure, while the rest of the market could not.

Those who keep a chain alive

#	Audience	The moment they need 9Chain	Answered by	Unlocks at level
4	Validator operators	When invited to join a network whose condition of entry is buying and holding that network's token	Identity-based validators, bound by contract, paid in real money	2 — needs participation artefacts and a publicly published node image
5	Customer-side operations teams	When leadership asks "if the vendor switches off, do we still have our ledger?"	The operator generates genesis, peer list and keys so they can run a node on their own infrastructure	2 — same reason

The fifth audience is what makes the phrase "multi-party" mean anything. If every node is run by one party, every promise about decentralisation is a figure of speech.

And here the document must point out a constraint on itself: both of these unlock at level 2 — the level whose gate is participation artefacts published publicly. A network that has not published them cannot yet call itself multi-party to outsiders; it is only multi-party with those it invited.

Those who verify

#	Audience	The moment they need 9Chain	Answered by	Unlocks at level
6	Auditors	When they must answer "was any transfer blocked last month, and why?" — a log holding only successes cannot answer that	An on-chain audit role; every refusal emits an event, including refusals at the interchain border	1
7	Regulators	When they need to know at which layer enforcement sits, and who is accountable when something goes wrong	A compliance gate at the protocol layer; a clearly written responsibility boundary between platform and issuer	1 to present · 4 to license

These two read the chain rather than run it, so they are easily forgotten at design time. But they decide whether a chain may touch real assets at all — so they must be served from the start, never added afterwards.

End users — the part not yet reached

#	Audience	The moment they need 9Chain	Answered by	Unlocks at level
8	Individuals	When they want a ledger nobody can switch off, but know nothing about infrastructure and do not want to	Describe in words, a human approves, the machine builds	3 — needs accounts, chains with owners, and low enough cost
9	AI agents	When an agent signs for something and afterwards nobody can answer who did this	Its own identity anchored at the protocol layer instead of a shared key	4 — and also a published shared identity scheme

These last two are the reason the project exists, and at the same time the two that cannot use it yet. Market demand shows the gap for the ninth growing very fast: agent numbers rise exponentially, the share of agents with their own identity does not.

The document places them at the end of the list rather than the start, because placing them first would be selling something that does not exist.

Who is NOT among the nine

A list containing only invitations is a suspicious list. The four groups below are not 9Chain's audience, and saying so is cheaper for both sides.

Not an audience	Why	What to use instead
An organisation needing only one party's internal ledger	There is nobody to distrust	A database
A public application maximising composability	Privacy here is a constraint, not a feature they want	A rollup or a public chain
An organisation wanting absolute control of its chain	Directly contradicts the one-third threshold: if one party can always decide, multi-party immutability means nothing	A database with an audit log, and say so plainly
Someone looking for a token to speculate on	The project does not sell, does not list, does not support the price	There is nothing here for them

The third group is the easiest one to lose, because they usually have budget and believe they are buying a blockchain. What they actually want is a database that looks like one.

One gate cutting across all nine

Four audiences can use it at the lowest level — to trial, to build, to verify. Three more wait for Open to outsiders. The last two are further off still.

But one boundary cuts across all of them: the moment someone else's real value is on the chain, every audience stops at the same gate — the Real assets level, with independent audit, a settled legal framework, and distribution across failure domains. Nobody routes around that gate, not even the first audience.

In short: a platform is only trustworthy when it can say who cannot use it yet, and who should not use it, as clearly as it says who already does.