Paper 2020/578 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2020/578 ↗

HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains

Zhuotao Liu
Yangxi Xiang
Jian Shi
Peng Gao
Haoyu Wang
Xusheng Xiao
Bihan Wen
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
Preprint.
History
2020-05-18: last updated
2020-05-18: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/578
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/578}
}
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