Business Model Innovation in the Era of Distributed Ledger Technologies

New ventures that incorporate Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) into their business model have globally emerged over the past years. DLTs enable anonymous, transparent and automated transactions and allow central authorities to become obsolete. This paper aims to develop a taxonomy for DLT based business models with a conceptual-to-empirical approach. The business model focused research effort includes expert interviews, database research and a digital survey. Moreover, we contribute to current business model innovation literature by identifying two mechanisms that describe different approaches for business model development in the context of not yet matured technology innovations.