Embodiments herein describe a hardware accelerator for a blockchain node. The hardware accelerator is used to perform a validation operation to validate one or more transactions before those transactions are committed to a ledger of a blockchain. The blockchain may include multiple peer-nodes, each of which contains standard software running on a server or container. Instead of validating a block of transactions using software, the hardware accelerator can validate the transactions in a fraction of the time. The peer-node software then gathers the validation results from the hardware accelerator and combines the results with received block data to derive the block which is committed to the stored ledger.