Topological Properties of Multi-Party Blockchain Transactions
This addresses a critical issue in blockchain interoperability for developers and users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing commit protocols with a new theoretical approach.
The paper tackles the problem of cross-blockchain transactions, which are challenging due to nondeterministic forks, by developing a topological framework to systematically reason about transaction outcomes, showing relationships between topological spaces for transactions and forks.
The cross-blockchain transaction remains one of the most challenging problems in blockchains. The root cause of the challenge lies in the nondeterministic nature of blockchains: A $n$-party transaction across multiple blockchains might be partially rolled back due to the potential forks in any of the participating blockchains---eventually, only one fork will survive in the competition among miners. While some effort has recently been made to developing hierarchically distributed commit protocols to make multi-party transactions progress, there is no systematic method to reason about the transaction outcome. This paper tackles this problem from a perspective of point-set topology. We construct multiple topological spaces for the transactions and blockchain forks, and show that these spaces are internally related through either homeomorphism or continuous functions. Combined together, these tools allow us to reason about the cross-blockchain transactions through the growing-fork topology, an intuitive representation of blockchains.