HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains

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

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 Interoperability Smart Contract Cross-chain dApps Web3.0
Contact author(s): redemptionliu1 @ gmail com
History: 2020-05-18: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/578
License: 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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/578}
}