SBlocksim: A sharding-based tool for simulating consensus efficiency

With more people joining blockchain, traditional methods for reaching consensus are becoming slower. The inefficiencies of blockchain transactions could hamper rapid progress. The existing simulators ignore sharding strategy, which is a popular solution to improve consensus efficiency in blockchain. In this perspective, we propose a blockchain simulator called SBlocksim with a sharding strategy. SBlocksim can flexibly combine to simulate different types of blockchains through modularization. The main goal of SBlocksim is to allow researchers to study the relationship between efficiency and algorithms, structures, and hyperparameters in blockchain. Possible further development of SBlocksimis is also briefly discussed. •A modular sharding-based tool for simulating consensus efficiency is proposed.•A method to reach consensus is simulated by parallel processing in shards.•Modular simulator can be easily extended to other consensus and sharding methods.