Interoperability in blockchain: A survey

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

12-2023

Abstract

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 Ethereum covering 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 in blockchain interoperability. For example, we identify challenges in interoperability across permissioned and permissionless blockchains, in interacting with scripting blockchains, in security and privacy.

Keywords

blockchain, cross-chain, interoperability, survey

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Information Security

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

35

Issue

12

First Page

12750

Last Page

12769

ISSN

1041-4347

Identifier

10.1109/TKDE.2023.3275220

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3275220

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