AtomCI: A New System for the Atomic Cross-Chain Smart Contract Invocation Spanning Heterogeneous Blockchains
Yulong Chen, Alia Asheralieva, Xuetao Wei
Abstract
Cross-chain dApps (decentralized applications) are enabled by smart contracts interoperability on heterogeneous blockchains. Previous work on cross-chain smart contract invocation has limitations in satisfying compatibility, atomicity, and security simultaneously. To address these limitations, this paper presents a new system <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AtomCI</small> that enables atomic cross-chain smart contract invocations spanning heterogeneous blockchains. Our system <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AtomCI</small> is enabled by a synergy of three proposed components: (1) Smart Contract Design Patterns, (2) Cross-chain Expression Protocol, and (3) Cross-chain Service Community, which is based on smart contracts and provides honest and auditable cross-chain service. We implement a prototype of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AtomCI</small> and analyze its security. Extensive results show that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AtomCI</small> imposes reasonable cost and latency of end-to-end cross-chain smart contract invocations, and has less impact of locks on the contract availability. The analysis and evaluation demonstrate that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AtomCI</small> is a promising approach to enable atomic smart contract invocations spanning heterogeneous blockchains.