Blockchain technology empowers the crowdfunding decision-making of marine ranching

•We establish a crowdfunding supply chain model of marine ranching powered by BT.•BT is important for building trust in the crowdfunding supply chain.•Enterprises choose different crowdfunding methods with different effects.•Enterprises should attract the consumers to participate in value co-creation. Marine ranching, as a new commercial form, the lack of construction and development funds has become its development constraint. Crowdfunding provides a new way to break through the financing bottleneck of marine ranching, and blockchain technology (BT) can effectively solve the problem of information asymmetry in crowdfunding progress. However, the choice of enterprise crowdfunding methods and the influence of consumer crowdfunding and pre-sale crowdfunding on supply chain value co-creation have not been deeply studied. Based on the theory of value co-creation, this paper uses multi-level programming and backward induction method to construct and solve the supply chain models of consumer crowdfunding and pre-sale crowdfunding under the traditional mode and BT mode, and obtains balanced results. Analyze the influence of the product green attributes, the degree of the enterprise’s attention to crowdfunding consumer value and ordinary consumer value, consumer recognition of product attributes (quality attributes, green attributes) and other parameters on supply chain operation; Through the comparative analysis of different models and numerical simulation, the optimal decision results are further discussed. The research shows that: (1) The overall value of the supply chain is higher when the marine ranching leading enterprise adopts the consumer crowdfunding method than when the pre-sale crowdfunding method. Moreover, the introduction of BT can improve the value of each subject in the supply chain system. (2) The marine ranching leading enterprise pays attention to the value of crowdfunding consumers and ordinary consumers, which will reduce their own value and increase the value of other subjects in the supply chain. The improvement of crowdfunding consumers' recognition of product attributes will improve their consumer value. (3) When the green attributes of products increase, the values of the leading enterprise, the retailer, the crowdfunding platform and consumers all increase, and the overall value of supply chain is improved. (4) Increasing product sales is the unified goal of all subjects in crowdfunding supply chain system, thus promoting the economic v