Design and Validation of BlockEval, A Blockchain Simulator

Abstract

Blockchain technology is finding its application in a wide range of areas. Due to the highly decentralized and distributed nature of blockchain technology, it is essential to understand the behaviour of a system before its actual deployment. In this paper, we introduce the design and architecture of our blockchain simulator, BlockEval, which mimics the behaviour of concurrent operations that occur in a real-life blockchain system. We have established the correctness of our simulator by comparing it with an independent model that is built from the real Bitcoin-transactions data using deep-learning techniques. Unlike existing validation procedures which do not scale to large topologies, our method is scalable and efficient in terms of time and compute-infrastructure requirements. The observations made using our simulator are found to match with the results obtained from the model trained on real Bitcoin-transactions data.