Towards a Full Scale Simulation of a Central Bank Digital Currency Via Payment Channel Networks

PCNs are a promising solution for overcoming blockchain limitations, such as scalability and privacy, yet understanding their behavior in large-scale deployments remains challenging. Currently, only custom and sequential simulators for PCNs exist, which are limited to evaluating small-scale networks. Parallel simulations could prove fundamental to understanding PCNs and gaining insights to develop payment systems, such as blockchain-based Central Bank Digital Currencies, capable of handling real-world payment loads effectively. We presented CLoTH-over-ROSS, a PCN model inspired by the CLoTH framework suited to run in ROSS, a popular parallel discrete event simulator. In this paper, through extensive experimentation, we investigate the model’s ability to scale as the number of available computing resources increases, highlighting its performance benefits and identifying critical bottlenecks that hinder the analysis of very large networks. These findings offer valuable insights for designing efficient and parallel PCN simulators, which can support the development of scalable blockchain-based solutions.