Embodiments herein describe a hardware accelerator (e.g., a network acceleration engine) for a blockchain machine or node. The hardware accelerator parses packets containing separate components of a block of transactions to generate data to perform a validation process. To avoid the latency that comes with using software, the embodiments herein describe a protocol processor in the hardware accelerator that parses the packets and prepares the data so it can be consumed by downstream components in the accelerator without software intervention. These downstream components can then perform a validation operation to validate one or more transactions before those transactions are committed (i.e., added) to a ledger of a permissioned blockchain.