Blockchain interoperability is emerging as one of the crucial features of blockchain technology, but the knowledge necessary for achieving it is fragmented. This fact makes it challenging for academics and the industry to seamlessly achieve interoperability among blockchains.
Given the novelty and potential of this new domain, we conduct a literature review on blockchain interoperability, by collecting 262 papers, and 70 grey literature documents, constituting a corpus of 332 documents. From those 332 documents, we systematically analyzed and discussed 80 documents, including both peer-reviewed papers and grey literature.
Our review classifies studies in three categories: Cryptocurrency-directed interoperability approaches, Blockchain Engines, and Blockchain Connectors. Each category is further divided into sub-categories based on defined criteria. We discuss not only studies within each category and subcategory but also across categories, providing a holistic overview of blockchain interoperability, paving the way for systematic research in this domain. Our findings show that blockchain interoperability has a much broader spectrum than cryptocurrencies.
The present survey leverages an interesting approach: we systematically contacted the authors of grey literature papers and industry solutions to obtain an updated view of their work. Finally, this paper discusses supporting technologies, standards, use cases, open challenges, and provides several future research directions.
Today's blockchain landscape is severely fragmented as more and more heterogeneous blockchain platforms have been developed in recent years. These blockchain platforms are not able to interact with each other or with the outside world since only little emphasis is placed on the interoperability between them. Already proposed solutions for blockchain interoperability such as naive relay or oracle solutions are usually not broadly applicable since they are either too expensive to operate or very resource-intensive. For that reason, we propose a blockchain interoperability oracle that follows a v…
Blockchain has become a popular emergent technology in many industries. It is suitable for a broad range of applications, from its base role as an immutable distributed ledger to the deployment of distributed applications. Many organizations are adopting the technology, but choosing a specific blockchain implementation in an emerging field exposes them to significant technology risk. Selecting the wrong implementation could expose an organization to security vulnerabilities, reduce access to its target audience, or cause issues in the future when switching to a more mature protocol. Blockchain…
Interoperability and scalability are currently the bottlenecks preventing mass adoption of blockchain technology. Development of an interoperable and scalable network that promotes a truly decentralised, permissionless and secure blockchain as well as one that enables micro validation is the main goal of this project. Layer-One.X, a truly decentralised ledger which utilises para-sharding, Directed Acyclic Graphs, Proof of Participation consensus mechanism, mobile computing, flash contracts and nucleus scripting is introduced in this paper. The conceptual framework including tokenomics is also …
Current blockchain technologies provide very limited interoperability. Restrictions with regards to asset transfers and data exchange between different blockchains reduce usability and comfort for users, and hinder novel developments within the blockchain space. As a first step towards cross-blockchain interoperability, we propose the DeXTT cross-blockchain transfer protocol, which can be used to transfer a token on any number of blockchains simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We provide a reference implementation using Solidity, and evaluate its performance. We show logarithmic scalabil…
The maturing of blockchain technology leads to heterogeneity, where multiple solutions specialize in a particular use case. While the development of different blockchain networks shows great potential for blockchains, the isolated networks have led to data and asset silos, limiting the applications of this technology. Blockchain interoperability solutions are essential to enable distributed ledgers to reach their full potential. Such solutions allow blockchains to support asset and data transfer, resulting in the development of innovative applications. This paper proposes a novel blockchain in…
The adoption of permissioned blockchain networks in enterprise settings has seen an increase in growth over the past few years. While encouraging, this is leading to the emergence of new data, asset and process silos limiting the potential value these networks bring to the broader ecosystem. Mechanisms for enabling network interoperability help preserve the benefits of independent sovereign networks, while allowing for the transfer or sharing of data, assets and processes across network boundaries. However, a naive approach to interoperability based on traditional point-to-point integration is…
XIR: A Framework for Interoperability across Cross-Chain Protocols Based on a Verifiable Intermediate Representation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学未来区块链与隐私计算高精尖创新中心）；Shandong Key Laboratory of Blockchain Finance, Shandong University of Finance and Economics（山东财经大学山东省区块链金融重点实验室）
With the increasing adoption of private blockchain platforms, consortia operating in various sectors such as trade, finance, logistics, etc., are becoming common. Despite having the benefits of a completely decentralized architecture which supports transparency and distributed control, existing private blockchains limit the data, assets, and processes within its closed boundary, which restricts secure and verifiable service provisioning to the end-consumers. Thus, platforms such as e-commerce with multiple sellers or cloud federation with a collection of cloud service providers cannot be decen…
Topos is an open interoperability protocol designed to reduce as much as possible trust assumptions by replacing them with cryptographic constructions and decentralization while exhibiting massive scalability. The protocol does not make use of a central blockchain, nor uses consensus to ensure consistent delivery of messages across a heterogeneous ecosystem of public and private blockchains, named subnets, but instead relies on a weak causal reliable broadcast implemented by a distributed network which we call $\textit{Transmission Control Engine}$ (TCE). The validity of cross-subnet messages …
Blockchain systems have received much attention and promise to revolutionize many services. Yet, despite their popularity, current blockchain systems exist in isolation, that is, they cannot share information. While interoperability is crucial for blockchain to reach widespread adoption, it is difficult to achieve due to differences among existing blockchain technologies. This paper presents a technique to allow blockchain interoperability. The core idea is to provide a primitive operation to developers so that contracts and objects can switch from one blockchain to another, without breaking c…
With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks, smart devices, and traditional information and communication technologies, there is tremendous growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services in our everyday life. IoT systems deal with high volumes of data. This data can be particularly sensitive, as it may include health, financial, location, and other highly personal information. Fine-grained security management in IoT demands effective access control. Several proposals discuss access control for the IoT, however, a limited focus is given to the emerging blockc…
The interoperability across multiple or many blockchains would play a critical role in the forthcoming blockchain-based data management paradigm. In particular, how to ensure the ACID properties of those transactions across an arbitrary number of blockchains remains an open problem in both academic and industry: Existing solutions either work for only two blockchains or requires a centralized component, neither of which would meet the scalability requirement in practice. This short paper shares our vision and some early results toward scalable cross-blockchain transactions. Specifically, we de…
This work is about the mutual influence between two technologies: Databases and Blockchain. It addresses two questions: 1. How the database technology has influenced the development of blockchain technology?, and 2. How blockchain technology has influenced the introduction of new functionalities in some modern databases? For the first question, we explain how database technology contributes to blockchain technology by unlocking different features such as ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) transactional consistency, rich queries, real-time analytics, and low latency. We ex…
Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping the incumbent industry to smart industry featured with data-driven decision-making. However, intrinsic features of IoT result in a number of challenges such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology brings the opportunities in addressing the challenges of IoT. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with IoT. We name such synthesis of blockchain and IoT as Blockchain of Things (BCoT). This paper presents an in-depth survey of BCoT and discusses the insights of this…
Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this…
With the support of the blockchain systems, the cryptocurrency has changed the world of virtual assets. Digital games, especially those with massive multi-player scenarios, will be significantly impacted by this novel technology. However, there are insufficient academic studies on this topic. In this work, we filled the blank by surveying the state-of-the-art blockchain games. We discuss the blockchain integration for games and then categorize existing blockchain games from the aspects of their genres and technical platforms. Moreover, by analyzing the industrial trend with a statistical appro…
