Frontiers | Blockchain and Additive Manufacturing: A Taxonomy of Business Models
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Blockchain
Sec. Blockchain in Industry
Volume 8 – 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2025.1563909
This article is part of the Research TopicDistributed Ledger Solutions in Web 4.0 and their Impact on Enterprises and SocietyView all 5 articles
- 1Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics, Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- 2Technical University Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany
Additive manufacturing processes such as 3D printing have seen significant progress in the industry in recent years and have become an integral part of Industry 4.0. This fourth industrial revolution is characterized by the increasing networking and automation of production systems and the use of large amounts of data. In this context, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), which include blockchain technology, offer promising opportunities to change production fundamentally. Production processes can be more secure and efficient by creating trust and transparency in data storage and eliminating dependence on centralized instances. However, the full potential of blockchain technology is often not realized due to the perceived complexity of its implementation. Overcoming this skepticism requires a better understanding of the application possibilities and, more importantly, successful practical examples demonstrating blockchain technology’s transformative power in the industry.This study explores how blockchain can be effectively integrated into additive manufacturing processes and offers a structured overview of existing blockchain-based business models within this domain. Hence, a systematic literature interview, Crunchbase review, and Workshop are performed to examine specific use cases of blockchain in additive manufacturing and analyze how these technologies interact with existing business models. In order to provide an overview of existing blockchain-based business models in the context of additive manufacturing, a taxonomy is developed in the underlying paper to identify characteristic features. The taxonomy is further demonstrated along different existing business models.
Keywords: Blockchain, AM, Additive manufacturing, 3D print, business models
Received: 20 Jan 2025; Accepted: 28 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Grünewald, Stuckmann-Blumenstein, Keitzl and Krämer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Patrick Stuckmann-Blumenstein, Technical University Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany
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