DAGBENCH: a performance evaluation framework for DAG distributed ledgers

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) has been emerging as the so-called Blockchain 3.0 after Bitcoin (Blockchain 1.0) and Ethereum (Blockchain 2.0). This new distributed ledger technology is getting significant attention for its high performance and low transaction fee. There have already been several notable implementations, such as IOTA [1], Nano [2] and Byteball [3]. In this paper, we present DAGBENCH as a performance evaluation framework for DAG implementations. DAGBENCH provides a number of sample workloads and adaptors that make effective and easy evaluation of different DAG implementations. It allows any DAG implementation to be evaluated by adding an adaptor. DAGBENCH allows to measure the performance of DAG implementation in terms of throughput, latency, scalability, success indicator, resource consumption, transaction data size and transaction fee. We demonstrate the efficacy of DAGBENCH with different DAG implementations. In particular, we have conducted experiments, on Amazon EC2, with three popular DAG implementations: IOTA, Nano and Byteball. Our experimental results provide the performance comparison between these implementations that helps developers/users effectively evaluate different performance characteristics; and, this enables them to identify bottlenecks and accordingly to improve performance.