Niji: Autonomous Payment Bridge Between Bitcoin and Consortium Blockchain

Abstract

The immense promise of reinventing business processes has led to the development of alternative blockchain technologies, such as consortium blockchain, that can deal with some of the issues of public blockchains such as used in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. However, a consortium blockchain, where its tokens have no market value, suffers from a lack of a method for payment for services, since the authority is concentrated with the entities that secure payment. Here, we describe Niji, a new cross-chain payment protocol that allows parties to perform Bitcoin payment securely on a consortium chain, without any trusted third-party or mediator. Niji introduces templatization of a transaction to validate Bitcoin payments efficiently on different consortium blockchains. The process from payment to service provision runs autonomously without any interaction between parties. An experiment measuring the computational cost and latency demonstrates the feasibility and efficacy of our implementation.