Blockchain technologies have received a large amount of attention, especially since the adaptation and popularity of cryptocurrencies. It is well-established that Blockchain technologies are the fuel of development of cryptocurrencies. There are several widely discussed topics surrounding Blockchain technologies. In this paper, the following topics will be discussed: consensus protocols within Blockchains, sharding protocols of different types of Blockchains, and the scalability challenges faced in the Blockchain community. This thesis will review current methodologies of performing experiments on Blockchains. Especially, to avoid unnecessary time and monetary cost of plugging in to the an existing Blockchain networks, this thesis investigates in several Blockchain network simulators, a...[ Read more ]

Blockchain technologies have received a large amount of attention, especially since the adaptation and popularity of cryptocurrencies. It is well-established that Blockchain technologies are the fuel of development of cryptocurrencies. There are several widely discussed topics surrounding Blockchain technologies. In this paper, the following topics will be discussed: consensus protocols within Blockchains, sharding protocols of different types of Blockchains, and the scalability challenges faced in the Blockchain community. This thesis will review current methodologies of performing experiments on Blockchains. Especially, to avoid unnecessary time and monetary cost of plugging in to the an existing Blockchain networks, this thesis investigates in several Blockchain network simulators, and introduces extended functions added to the an existing simulator. This updated simulator achieves the objectives of simulating different Blockchain network layers with relevant flexibilities. To evaluate and showcase the usage of this simulator, this thesis will also conduct experiments to explore options in cutting edge methodologies of sharding protocols in open Blockchains.