A Framework to Evaluate Blockchain Interoperability Solutions

Decentralized ledger technology (DLT), in particular blockchain, is becoming ubiquitous in today's society. Just in the second quarter of 2021, centralized and decentralized exchanges had a volume of around $600 billion. Enterprises are adopting this technology, following the opportunity to expand to new businesses. However, they need to connect their existing systems and processes to blockchains securely and reliably. Blockchain interoperability (BI) is emerging as one of the crucial features of blockchain technology. Fueled by the need to eliminate data and value silos, they realize the necessary bridge between centralized and decentralized systems.

As BI is still maturing, there are many unsolved challenges. In particular, it is still difficult for developers and practitioners to have control over processes spawning across several DLTs.

In this report, we focus on the problem of managing cross-chain state in an integrated manner. First, we introduce the concept of cross-chain logic/cross-chain rules. After that, we present and discuss the results of our BI survey. Finally, we propose the BI evaluation framework, the first step to systematically evaluate BI solutions.