Efficient and Atomic Cross-blockchain Transaction Processing for Decentralized Web3 Applications

Abstract

Web3 has received considerable attention from industry and academia due to its groundbreaking revolution to decentralize the current centralized web. As a fundamental building block, blockchain provides web3 with the ability to rebuild trust in the trustless decentralized web. More and more blockchain-based web3 applications are taking place and becoming successful. Many web3 applications generate coupled data and transactions from multiple blockchains and demand efficient and atomic cross-blockchain transaction processing; however, existing approaches rarely consider transaction atomicity, and the processing efficiency is inferior. In this work, we formally model multi-blockchain systems and formulate the cross-blockchain transaction processing problem. Then, we propose a novel consensus mechanism, namely proof of credible contributions, to solve the efficiency and atomicity issues in cross-blockchain transaction processing. Inside, we define credible contributions as a measure of blockchain nodes’ credits and workload, so as to make nodes compete to handle as many cross-blockchain transactions as possible. Furthermore, we propose the flag-referenceconfirm protocol to guarantee transaction atomicity. Extensive experimental results indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of proof of credible contributions.