Interoperability in Blockchain: A Survey

This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive survey on blockchain interoperability, where interoperability is defined as the ability of blockchains to flexibly transfer assets, share data, and invoke smart contracts across a mix of public, private, and consortium blockchains without any change...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 35; no. 12; pp. 1 - 20
Main Authors Ren, Kunpeng, Ho, Nhut-Minh, Loghin, Dumitrel, Nguyen, Thanh-Toan, Ooi, Beng Chin, Ta, Quang-Trung, Zhu, Feida
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.12.2023
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Bitcoin
Blockchain
Blockchains
Contracts
cross-chain
Cryptography
Digital currencies
Interoperability
Peer-to-peer computing
Performance evaluation
Privacy
Relays
Safety
Smart contracts
survey
Surveys
Taxonomy
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Summary:This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive survey on blockchain interoperability, where interoperability is defined as the ability of blockchains to flexibly transfer assets, share data, and invoke smart contracts across a mix of public, private, and consortium blockchains without any changes to the underlying blockchain systems. Analyzing the vast landscape of both research papers and industry projects, we classify the existing works into five categories, namely, (1) sidechains, (2) notary schemes, (3) hashed time lock contracts (HTLC), (4) relays, and (5) blockchain agnostic protocols. We analyze the existing works under a taxonomy that consists of system and safety characteristics, such as decentralization, direction of communication, locking mechanism, verification mechanism, trust, safety, liveness, and atomicity. Different from other surveys, we are the first to evaluate the performance of some representative interoperability approaches between Bitcoin and Ethereumcovering sidechains, notary schemes, and HTLCs. Even though the performance of cross-chain transactions is low (typically fewer than 10 transactions per second), the main reason is the underlying blockchain ( e.g. , Bitcoin and Ethereum) and not the interoperability approach. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and possible research directions inblockchain interoperability. For example, we identify challenges in interoperability acrosspermissioned and permissionless blockchains, in interacting with scripting blockchains, in security and privacy.
ISSN:1041-4347
1558-2191
DOI:10.1109/TKDE.2023.3275220