A notary group-based cross-chain mechanism

Abstract

As an emerging distributed technology, blockchain has begun to penetrate into many fields such as finance, healthcare, supply chain, intelligent transportation. However, the interoperability and value exchange between different independent blockchain systems is restricting the expansion of blockchain. In this paper, a notary group-based cross-chain interaction model is proposed to achieve the interoperability between different blockchains. Firstly, a notary election mechanism is proposed to choose one notary from the notary group to act as a bridge for cross-chain transactions. Secondly, a margin pool is introduced to limit the misconduct of the elected notary and ensure the value transfer between the involved blockchains. Moreover, a reputation based incentive mechanism is used to encourage members of the notary group to participate in cross-chain transactions. Ethereum-based experiments demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can provide an acceptable performance for cross-chain transactions and provide a higher security level than ordinary cross-chain mechanisms.