USSC: Universal and Storage-Efficient Sidechains

Abstract

Blockchain interoperability has become an essential functionality, which enables asset/data transfers across different blockchains. Sidechains have been deemed as a key technique to provide interoperability. However, sidechains are rarely used in practice, this is because sidechain technologies are impractical and non cost-efficient. To make sidechains practical, in this paper, we design a universal sidechain construction named USSC, which applies to a variety of blockchains without forking them. USSC also enables interoperability across heterogeneous blockchains regardless of underlying consensus. This is facilitated by three components: i) a committee selection method, ii) a cross-chain certificate, and iii) a cross-chain bridge based on smart contracts. The proposed committee-selection method guarantees an honest majority within a committee. Through a concrete implementation of USSC, we outline how the proof-of-stake (PoS) and the proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains enable asset transfers. Furthermore, our USSC is more storage-efficient because it produces a smaller size of certificate and only needs partial nodes instead of all sidechain nodes following a blockchain. Thus, USSC can reduce the overhead of storage and communication of nodes. In addition, we prove that USSC achieves a secure sidechain construction with desirable security properties. Finally, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation of USSC using Cardano and Ethereum. Experimental results demonstrate that USSC outperforms PoW and PoS sidechains, in terms of the certificate size.