BCTMark: a Framework for Benchmarking Blockchain Technologies

Over the last years, research activities on blockchain technologies have fairly increased. Firstly introduced with Bitcoin, some projects have since emerged to create or improve blockchain features like privacy while others propose to overcome technical limitations such as scalability and energy consumption. New proposals are often evaluated with ad hoc tools and experimental environments. Reproducibility and comparison of these new contributions with the state of the art of the blockchain technologies are therefore complicated. To the best of our knowledge, only a few tools partially address the design of a generic benchmarking of blockchain technologies (e.g., load generation). In this paper, we introduce BCTMark, a generic framework for benchmarking blockchain technologies on an emulated network in a reproducible way. To illustrate the portability of experiments using BCTMark, we have conducted some experiments on two different testbeds: a cluster of Dell PowerEdge R630 servers (Grid'5000) and one of Raspberry Pi 3+. Experiments have been conducted on three different blockchain systems (Ethereum Clique/Ethash and Hyperledger Fabric) to measure their CPU consumption and energy footprint for different numbers of clients.