Survey on Progress of Blockchain Interoperability Technology

Abstract

Blockchain technology leads the development of a new generation of data storage technology due to its excellent features such as decentralization and high transparency. It has been widely used in social governance, finance and insurance, digital copyright and other fields in recent years. However, as a self-contained system based on standards and protocols, data communication between different blockchains cannot be realized directly, which makes it difficult to meet the data sharing needs of cross-domain applications, and blockchain interoperability technology comes into being. At present, there are few project examples of this technology analyzed. Based on the latest research of blockchain interoperability, this paper systematically summarizes the representative solutions of interoperability technology recently and prospects the future development directions. Firstly, the blockchain interoperability methods are classified into two types of homogeneous expansion and heterogeneous interoperability, according to the structural differences of each blockchain in communication. Secondly, this paper introduces two types of representative methods according to the technical development and blockchain hierarchy, sorts out the implementation principles and technical details of each method, and summarizes their advantages and disadvantages. Thirdly, this paper introduces the progress of currently implemented blockchain interoperability projects, focusing on their implementation ideas, operation modes and status quo, and their performance is compared and analyzed in terms of throughput, security and other indicators. Finally, this paper foresees the development trend of blockchain interoperability technology in various directions.

Keywords

• blockchain; interoperability; crosschain; blockchain ecosystem