A Blockchain-based company is launching a peer-to-peer network connecting clients with manufacturers of all sizes – preventing bottlenecks in production by mapping out manufacturing capacities around the world.

Productivist says its platform is an “open, global and free alternative” to the relocations and heavy investments that many firms and individuals in the manufacturing sector are faced with if they want to grow and flourish.

The company has created a smart device which connects manufacturing tools to the Blockchain – allowing progress on orders and spare capacity to be detected and monitored in real time.

According to Productivist, clients would benefit because it would become less expensive to source the right manufacturing expertise.

Once an assignment has been accepted, the platform would generate a shortlist of candidates based on the project’s technical requirements, the deadline, as well as a manufacturer’s availability and reputation. From here, each provider would make a bid with their most competitive price and deadline, with Productivist selecting the winner on behalf of the client.

Information recorded on smart contracts would be used to generate a score for manufacturers between 100 and 1,000, with higher ratings enabling clients to reduce the risk of low-quality results.

The company aims to make minimum order quantities a thing of the past and believes there could be environmental advantages because it would be easier to find local manufacturers – reducing a project’s carbon footprint.

“Our intention is to create a new protocol, an ecosystem where any marketplace, company or factory will be able to connect. We will provide Blockchain access, an application programming interface (API) and a software development kit (SDK), and users will create their own decentralized production service according to their needs. It will make the implementation faster, easier and cheaper to every new partner joining the ecosystem” the company told Cointelegraph.

One major concern of businesses is the protection of their intellectual property when it is in the hands of manufacturers. Productivist plans to safeguard sensitive information through “highly innovative applications.” One example is a feature on its smart device which streams sensitive files directly to a 3D printer.

The company’s white paper cites research from Accenture which suggests companies in the industrial equipment sector could save $1.6 bln if they embraced autonomous robots, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, big data and Blockchain technology. A different study by Grand View Research indicates the smart manufacturing market will have a value of €325 bln ($395 bln) in just seven years time.

Smoother transactions at lower costs

Productivist is based in France and Dubai – and its team is behind another successful manufacturing concept called FreeLabster.com. FreeLabster is a collaborative network which links the owners of 3D printers with prospective clients, and since launching in 2016, it has already amassed 3,000 firms and individuals who are willing to offer their resources for industrial and private projects.

At present, more than 10,000 3D printers are listed on the website, and generally, it takes three minutes before clients receive an offer from a “FreeLabster.” The company says orders are generally turned around in 48 hours. It has also forged five major partnerships – one of them with Boulanger, one of France’s largest retail chains.

The ProducToken – or PROD for short – will be the main cryptocurrency used on the Productivist platform, with the company claiming it will ensure “smoother transactions at lower costs.” Manufacturers are going to be rewarded with PROD tokens when they register their capacity on the platform, and in time, they will be able to use this currency to buy new equipment at a discount. The token is ERC20 compliant, meaning it is “liquid and tradable on all exchanges.”

Integration into FreeLabster planned

By the first quarter of 2019, FreeLabster is going to be migrated onto the Productivist Blockchain – paving the way for its solution to go live in the following quarter. A beta version of the company’s smart device is penciled in for release by the end of the year.

Productivists’ pre-ICO is running from May 1 to May 15, with a 28 percent bonus offered on PROD tokens. This will be followed by a five-phase ICO running from May 16 to July 31.