Abstract

Blockchain Technology has gained prominence since 2008 with trust, reliability, speed, and transparency becoming major advantages. It has also been applied and researched within a multitude of industry applications ranging from manufacturing to financial transactions through to real estate. In addition to Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT), Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) such as blockchain serves as the backbone to the Machine Economy, which is a relatively recent concept in which machines can communicate and exchange data with each other autonomously, allowing manufacturing companies to become more competitive. However, using blockchain for exchanging large volumes of data requires significant fees and energy due to its use of miners to validate transactions which is a barrier for manufacturing companies to implement. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which is a different type of DLT is an example of an alternative to blockchain which aims to overcome most of the problems currently on the blockchain and promises to enable fee-less transactions with much lower power requirements than blockchain. In this paper, the authors explore the DLT aspect of the machine economy within the manufacturing context. Firstly, the enabling DLT technical attributes of the machine economy are analysed. This is followed by an evaluation of alternative DLT’s other than blockchain, focusing on the challenges and benefits of each alternative. Following on from this, an outlook on future research directions is discussed.