A Systematic Local Fork Management Framework for Blockchain Sandbox Environments

Abstract

Blockchain technology presently permeates multiple industries, resulting in an increasing number of agents (primarily end-users and engineers) interacting with it in a variety of contexts. This, in turn, has introduced the practical need for a sufficient tooling ecosystem for blockchain solutions testing and evaluation under secure environment conditions. To that end, this study presents a robust framework for the creation and management of customisable, persistent, private, scalable blockchain environments that fulfill precisely the need for live sandbox platforms with on-chain interaction capabilities. We extend the concept of local chain forking, emphasising the limitations of existing tooling and methodologies and propose how our framework mitigates identified weaknesses and bridges some of the resulting gaps in desirable non-functional attributes. We offer a reference implementation for our framework and discuss how it can be applicable to a broad array of DevOps and security-oriented Use Cases. Finally, emerging challenges are discussed and potential directions for further research are drawn.