Duration
About 3.5 hours
You set every stage timing from the professor panel, so it fits one block or splits across two sessions.
Blockchain Simulation
Blockchain simulation where students redesign a payment chain
The Finsimco Blockchain Simulation gives each student a cross-border payments business with five intermediaries and two and a half days of settlement. The board wants to know where the money actually goes.
- About 3.5 hours, single-player
- Settlement, finality and the business case
- In-class, online or hybrid delivery
At a glance
Format
Single-player simulation
Each student holds the process, design and business case roles in turn and submits one design with its economics.
Level
Undergraduate to MBA
Adjustable: a two-party corridor on a fixed design, up to a multi-currency network and a partner refusal.
Professor tools
Timeline and session controls
Manage students, adjust stage timings, control progression and monitor individual inputs.
Prerequisites
None
No technical background. Correspondent banking, nostro balances, finality and throughput are taught inside.
Delivery
In class, online or hybrid
The web-based simulation supports in-person, remote, blended and homework-supported delivery.
Assessment
Optional, per student
Every submission is individual, so the process maps, the design choices and the review answers export per student.
Course fit
Fits fintech and operations modules
Designed for Fintech, Banking, Payments, Information Systems and Operations Management courses.
Concepts covered
The topics a blockchain module has to cover: correspondent banking and the payment chain, nostro balances and trapped working capital, settlement finality, consensus, validators and throughput, permissioned against public networks and building the business case.
A hundred thousand dollar payment through the correspondent chain: sending bank, two correspondents, a clearing system and the receiving bank. The fees total four hundred and twenty dollars and the time two and a half days, but the largest cost is not a fee. It is the nostro balance, four hundred thousand dollars held idle so the payment can be made at all, costing eighteen thousand a year to fund. A shared ledger removes the reconciliation rather than the fee, which is why the saving shows up in the capital line.
Learning outcomes
Written to drop into your module descriptor without rewriting. On completing the simulation, your students will be able to:
- Map a payment through an intermediated chain and quantify fee, time and capital at each hop.
- Explain why reconciliation rather than transmission is the expensive part of settlement.
- Explain what settlement finality means and why it frees working capital.
- Evaluate the trade-off between the number of validators, resilience and throughput.
- Distinguish a permissioned network from a public one on operational grounds.
- Build a business case for a distributed ledger that a treasurer would accept.
What students do
Each student works the corridor alone, holding the process, design and business case roles in turn. All three want something different from the same chain, and only one design is submitted.
The gameflow every student sees before they start. The three roles come into play while the chain is mapped and the network designed; briefing, the assessment and the debrief are worked as a single view. Materials arrive stage by stage: corridor data and role cards at briefing, then the hop analysis, nostro report and reconciliation log, then the throughput tests, partner positions and regulator queries.
Process
Students follow one payment through every intermediary and record what each hop costs in fee, in time and in capital held idle so it can be made at all.
Design
Students choose who validates, how many of them there are and what finality means, which is the engineering decision expressed as a business one.
Business case
Students turn the design into a saving the board will recognise, which turns out to be a balance sheet line rather than a cost line.
How it works
Five stages. Students map the payment chain, design a replacement and defend the economics of it.
- 1
Stage 1 · 15 min
Briefing Docs · Corridor Data · Role Cards
1Briefing
Students watch the intro video, review a corridor carrying nine hundred million dollars a year through five intermediaries, and take on all three roles, checking the fee schedule, the nostro balances and the success criteria before any design work begins.
- 2
Stage 2 · 55 min
Hop Analysis · Nostro Report · Reconciliation Log · Tool Tips
2Map the Chain
The chain is mapped before anything is designed. Working as process, the student prices every hop in fee, delay and capital; as design, decides who would run a node and how many; as business case, discovers that the fees total four hundred and twenty dollars and the idle capital eighteen thousand a year.
- 3
Stage 3 · 55 min
Throughput Tests · Partner Positions · Regulator Queries · Live Scores
3The Network
The design meets reality. Peak volume exceeds what the chosen validator count can clear, a participant refuses to join without a governance seat, the regulator asks what finality means in a dispute, and the capital release the business case depends on arrives only if the ledger is actually trusted.
- 4
Stage 4 · 40 min
Review Questions · Design Summary · Outcome Report · Review Pack
4The Assessment
The case is assessed. Students are asked where the saving came from, how many validators they chose and what it cost in throughput, what finality means in their design when two participants disagree, and whether the board would approve the build on the number they produced.
- 5
Stage 5 · No limit
Winners · Completion Summary
5Debriefing
Students review their own design, compare savings and throughput across the cohort, revisit the choices that separated them and reflect on the feedback. Winners and the completion summary give you a structure for the discussion.
What the experience looks like
The student interface carries the hops, the design and the economics. The professor panel carries the timeline, the controls and every individual business case.
Chain
Students work hop by hop, with the fee, the delay and the capital held idle to make the hop possible side by side, and a written reason required for every cost assigned.
Network
The throughput column is the one that bites. The most decentralised design on offer clears a third of the volume the corridor actually carries.
Professor Controls
Your view. Adjust any stage timing, start or stop the session, and compare the validator count each student chose with the saving their case claims.
See how this simulation fits your module
Explore the student and professor experience, and discuss timing, setup and syllabus fit.
Where it fits your syllabus
It works best as the session that moves the subject off the technology.
Teach before it
Nothing technical. Correspondent banking, nostro balances, finality and consensus are explained inside the activity.
Where it sits
Mid module, typically weeks four to eight, once payments have been introduced.
What it sets up
Digital currencies, tokenisation, smart contracts, market infrastructure, and any assessment asking students to appraise a distributed ledger proposal.
The blockchain course guide sets out where it sits in a full module.
What students get wrong
The three mistakes students make on this case, and what each one gives you in the debrief. Our simulations are designed around them: read the learning science behind it.
1
They chase the fees
Four hundred and twenty dollars of fees is the number everybody can see and the one the business case gets built on, and it is not where the money is. The nostro capital costs forty times as much and never appears on a cost line.
2
They choose a public network by default
Adding validators buys resilience against participants the bank already contracts with, and costs throughput the corridor actually needs. Students pick the most decentralised option and then cannot clear peak volume.
3
They assume finality is free
Irreversible settlement is what releases the capital, and it is also what means a mistaken payment cannot be recalled. Students claim the saving without designing the exception process that makes it acceptable to an operations team.
How to debrief it
The debrief runs itself. Every student sees their results, the cohort comparison and the decisions that produced them, with nothing for you to prepare. If you would rather lead the discussion, these questions work straight from a slide, and they use what your cohort actually did.
- Where did your saving actually come from?
- How many validators did you choose, and what did it cost in throughput?
- What does finality mean in your design when two participants disagree?
- Whose design cleared peak volume, and what did they give up?
- Would the board approve the build on your number?
Assess the economics and the design trade-off, not the technology
Assessment is optional. Run the simulation ungraded as an applied activity, or use platform data as supporting evidence. Every student generates a process map, a network design, a business case, an outcome and written rationales. Because the simulation is single-player, every input belongs to one named student, so there is no group-work marking to untangle. All of it exports as CSV or PDF, per student, so you can assess reasoning rather than a result.
What professors can assess
- Whether fee cost and capital cost were separated rather than merged
- Whether the validator count was justified against the corridor's actual throughput
How to interpret the score
- A large headline saving is not proof the case holds; read where it came from
- Use the leaderboard for cohort comparison, not for grading
On generative AI: written rationales are exactly what marking teams now worry about. Because every rationale here is tied to a process map the student built inside the platform before the design was tested, the reasoning can be checked against the evidence rather than taken on trust.
Low risk to try with a class
Students rate it
93% of students rate Finsimco simulations Excellent, across more than 30,000 responses.
You are not on your own
Teaching notes, a setup and facilitation guide and a gameflow diagram come with it, and we support your first delivery directly.
No grading commitment
Run it ungraded the first time. Assessment is optional and can be added once you have seen how your cohort responds.
A bad session is recoverable
Pause or stop at any point and resume later without losing submitted data, so an overrun costs you a timetable slot, not the activity.
Read what lecturers say.
What AACSB and AMBA say about simulations
Ron Tuninga, Managing Director for EMEA at AACSB, and Victor Hedenberg, Membership Director at AMBA, on why simulation-based learning belongs in business education. Watch both interviews.
FAQs
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Get the course fit sheet
A one-page summary of this simulation, covering stages and timings, roles, concepts, learning outcomes and the debrief questions, plus a full sample teaching pack from one of our live simulations, so you can see exactly what you would be running.
Book a Demo
During the call, we can:
- Show the student and professor experience
- Discuss format, timing and syllabus fit
- Walk through setup, live delivery and optional assessment evidence
- Answer questions from your module team