Towards a Framework for Understanding the Performance of Blockchains

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) appears to be at a worldwide threshold of acceptance and adoption. Since their inception, several innovative projects have been proposing solutions to the blockchain trilemma, improving blockchain features and its technical limitations. However, the adoption of blockchain as a technology or a software component, requires a comprehensive understanding and characterization of their technical principles and characteristics. The latter introduces an uncertainty for an organization to decide which blockchain protocol best meets its needs and demands. In general, there is a lack of proper testing and software engineering practices for assessing the usage of blockchains usage and understanding their performance. Towards that direction, this paper presents an architecture for a blockchain benchmarking framework which aims at the deployment and evaluation of different blockchain protocols, focusing on different aspects such as security and scalability. A set of modules is introduced for testing and evaluating the behaviour of blockchain protocols under different test scenarios.