The Shadow Simulator
Ethshadow is a tool to easily configure and run simulated Ethereum networks. Under the hood, it uses Shadow, a discrete-event network simulator that enables us to run simulations with actual Ethereum clients instead of specifically written simulation code.
The advantages of using Ethshadow are as follows.
- It already includes everything in the simulation (e.g. libp2p, discv5, etc).
- It uses the same software as the mainnet and the public testnets.
- If there is any upgades in the supported clients, we can integrate those upgrades easily in the simulation.
If you want to simulate a new Ethereum protocol, what you need to do is just to implement it in supported clients and run it using this simulator.