Blockchain sim

SimBlock. © Distributed Systems Group (Shudo Lab).

SimBlock is a blockchain simulator developed by Kazuyuki Shudo, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which allows users to easily experiment with the functioning of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and soon, Ethereum. It runs on any computer that supports Java and allows users to change the behavior of the nodes in the blockchain. The changes can be applied to all nodes, to an individual node, or to a group of nodes. SimBlock simulates the network size of a blockchain, the block-generation frequency and the communication speeds, taking into account the bandwidth and latency between six geographical regions. To help users understand the behavior of a network after various changes, the group has created a visualization tool showing communications between the nodes, as well as the length of a chain of blocks. “Though we developed SimBlock for our own research,” Kazuyuki Shudo explains, “we decided to make it publicly available as open source so that other researchers can use it and so help accelerate blockchain research.” The code and documentation are available on GitHub.

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, “Open-source tool lets anyone experiment with cryptocurrency blockchains.”