BlockLite: A Lightweight Emulator for Public Blockchains

Abstract: Blockchain is an enabler of many emerging decentralized applications in areas of cryptocurrency, Internet of Things, smart healthcare, among many others. Although various open-source blockchain frameworks are available, the infrastructure is complex enough and difficult for many users to modify or test out new research ideas. To make it worse, many advantages of blockchain systems can be demonstrated only at large scales, e.g., thousands of nodes, which are not always available to researchers. This demo paper presents a lightweight single-node emulator of blockchain systems, namely \mbox{BlockLite}, designed to be executing real proof-of-work workload along with peer-to-peer network communications and hash-based immutability. BlockLite employs a preprocessing approach to avoid the per-node computation overhead at runtime and thus scales to thousands of nodes. Moreover, BlockLite offers an easy-to-use programming interface allowing for a Lego-like customization to the system, e.g. new ad-hoc consensus protocols.