Virtual Sandbox

Virtual Chain Sandbox is a developer tool that lets smart contract engineers spin up virtual EVM instances and test how their contracts behave under parallel execution. Built as a Hardhat plugin, it deploys contracts to EVVM-based virtual chains and benchmarks transaction throughput, latency, and gas efficiency under serial vs. parallel execution modes inspired by Arcology’s concurrency model.

A lightweight React dashboard visualizes the performance data, making it easy to compare different configurations and identify bottlenecks. The project bridges EVVM’s scalable virtual execution, Hardhat’s developer workflow, and Arcology’s high-performance parallelism — helping developers build and test next-generation, high-throughput decentralized applications.

Virtual Chain Sandbox is built around a custom Hardhat plugin (hardhat-evvm-bench) that integrates directly with EVVM’s virtual execution environment and Arcology’s parallel transaction model. The plugin lets developers initialize a virtual chain, deploy contracts, and run performance benchmarks comparing serial vs. parallel execution modes.

Under the hood, the plugin is written in TypeScript, using Hardhat’s task architecture to expose commands like evvm:init, evvm:deploy, and evvm:benchmark. For benchmarking, it simulates transaction batches and measures metrics such as TPS, latency, and gas cost. The parallel execution model is powered by Arcology’s concurrency framework, which we used to execute multiple transactions simultaneously within isolated virtual environments provided by EVVM.

We built a React + Vite + Tailwind dashboard to visualize results. The plugin outputs structured JSON data, which the frontend reads to generate real-time graphs and comparisons between execution modes.

Using Hardhat as the base made developer integration seamless — no new tools needed, just install the plugin and start testing. Integrating EVVM and Arcology gave us access to scalable, concurrent virtualized EVM execution, making the sandbox realistic and powerful.

For the hackathon, we also implemented mock interfaces to simulate parts of the EVVM runtime locally — a hacky but effective way to prototype parallel execution logic before connecting to real endpoints.