Paper 2020/578

HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains

Zhuotao Liu, Yangxi Xiang, Jian Shi, Peng Gao, Haoyu Wang, Xusheng Xiao, Bihan Wen, and Yih-Chun Hu

Abstract

Blockchain interoperability, which allows state transitions across different blockchain networks, is critical functionality to facilitate major blockchain adoption. Existing interoperability protocols mostly focus on atomic token exchange between blockchains. However, as blockchains have been upgraded from passive distributed ledgers into programmable state machines (thanks to smart contracts), the scope of blockchain interoperability goes beyond just token exchange. In this paper, we present HyperService, the first platform that delivers interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains. HyperService is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a developer-facing programming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications in a unified programming model; and (ii) a secure blockchain-facing cryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains. We implement a prototype of HyperService in approximately 35,000 lines of code to demonstrate its practicality. Our experiment results show that (i) HyperService imposes reasonable latency, in order of seconds, on the end-to-end execution of cross-chain applications; (ii) the HyperService platform is scalable to continuously incorporate additional production blockchains

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ACM CCS 2019
DOI
10.1145/3319535.3355503
Keywords
Blockchain InteroperabilitySmart ContractCross-chain dAppsWeb3.0
Contact author(s)
redemptionliu1 @ gmail com
History
2020-05-18: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/578
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/578,
      author = {Zhuotao Liu and Yangxi Xiang and Jian Shi and Peng Gao and Haoyu Wang and Xusheng Xiao and Bihan Wen and Yih-Chun Hu},
      title = {HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/578},
      year = {2020},
      doi = {10.1145/3319535.3355503},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/578}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/578}
}
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