Introducing Simulation Platform: A Net-New Capability for the Ethereum Ecosystem

We are excited to introduce our new Ethereum Simulation Platform and provide every member of the ecosystem with ready access to live transaction simulations of pending marketable internal transactions.

Simulation Platform unlocks profit potential for traders and helps protocols intercept malicious transactions before they can get confirmed on-chain. This is a new class of mempool Lego brick that serves to further level the playing field in Ethereum's Dark Forest. 

Introducing Blocknative Simulation Platform

Our Simulation Platform computes and summarizes the likely results of every marketable pending transaction against the current state of the chain – in real-time, at scale, and with low latency.

Specifically, Simulation Platform:

• Simulates all marketable pending transactions to reveal their probabilistic outcome. 
• Leverages our Global Mempool Data Platform to provide coverage of every public pending Ethereum transaction.
• Incorporates our ETH gas API platform results to determine the marketable price for inclusion in the next block.
• Provides detailed JSON payloads that show every smart contract function call and net balance change.
• Has an easy-to-integrate API that is fully documented and actively supported.

This unlocks new profit opportunities for traders and enables new forms of protocol protection for builders.

A unique input source: the mempool itself

Simulation Platform is powered directly by the Ethereum Mainnet mempool. Every signed, marketable pending transaction is simulated automatically.

By leveraging the mempool as our sole source of input, Simulation Platform is able to provide actionable insights into upcoming transactions — enabling traders and builders to act prior to confirmation.

Exceptionally low-latency

Simulation Platform currently computes simulations nearly twice as fast as the built-in capabilities of Parity/OpenEthereum and 10 times faster than Geth. In fact, one of our sophisticated beta customers reported performance improvements of over 1,000ms – more than a full second! – as compared to their internal benchmarks. This gives you a massive head start to take action on events that are about to happen.

Simulation Platform is powered by our underlying Simulation Engine, which is comprised of both custom code and dedicated, parallelized hardware. A typical Simulation Platform transaction takes less than 200ms to simulate – though some will take more and many will take less.

Our internal testing shows a direct correlation between the cost of a transaction – that is, the actual ETH gas used – and the time required to perform the simulation. In other words, more complex transactions require more gas, and hence more computation to simulate.

Accurate, complete, and detailed

In addition to raw system performance, much of our development effort has gone into ensuring that our our simulations are: 

• Accurate: All pending Mainnet transactions are simulated against the current block state. The resulting simulation calculates what would happen if this transaction were to be confirmed in the next block.
• Complete: Our Simulation Engine performs successful simulations for well over 99% of all marketable pending transactions. This virtually eliminates the blindspots that can result from failed simulations. 
• Detailed:: Simulation Platform event payloads break down the following for each simulated transaction: 
  • Every transaction functional call,
  • To every contract,
  • With every asset involved,
  • Including all amounts, 
  • Along with a summary of each net balance change, as well as 
  • A detailed performance summary of the simulation process itself. 

We do all of the above and much more to consistently create simulations that traders and builders can rely and act on.

An actionable edge for traders and builders 

Simulation Platform helps traders understand the potential outcome of a particular trade or arbitrage opportunity prior to confirmation and execution. This net-new capability will make existing trading strategies more successful as well as enable new classes of strategies that previously were not possible or practical.

Simulation Platform helps builders by providing a new dimension of understanding of how your projects and protocols are being used in the wild. So that you can improve the user experience of your dapp and monitor for anomalous, attack-shaped transactions – potentially including real-time protection from novel exploits.

Go hands-on with Simulation Platform today on Ethereum

Blocknative's Simulation Platform is now available to all Ethereum builders and traders. To go hands-on with Simulation Platform, simply create a free Blocknative account to get started. You will then be able to access Simulation Platform through Mempool Explorer or by integrating our API into your trading bot or protocol.

Simulation Platform in Mempool Explorer

Since Simulation Platform is more computationally complex – and therefore more expensive – to deliver, we have also updated our pricing and terms & conditions to reflect these new capabilities.

As with everything we build, we are just getting started. We have a rich roadmap for Simulation Platform that will be further informed by our early adopters. Please connect with our team in our Discord Community if you have specific questions or feature requests.