Open problems in cross-chain protocols
It addresses real-world application gaps in blockchain interoperability for developers, but is incremental as it focuses on highlighting existing problems rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper identifies unresolved practical challenges that developers face when implementing cross-chain protocols, despite existing theoretical advances in blockchain interoperability.
Blockchain interoperability is a prominent research field which aims to build bridges between otherwise isolated blockchains. With advances in cryptography, novel protocols are published by academia and applied in different applications and products in the industry. In theory, these innovative protocols provide strong privacy and security guarantees by including formal proofs. However, pure theoretical work often lacks the perspective of real world applications. In this work, we describe a number of hardly researched problems which developers encounter when building cross-chain products.