A digital twin framework for smart contract-based DeFi applications in the metaverse: Towards interoperability, service scaleup & resilience

Abstract

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is expected to be the backbone for the metaverse facilitating B2B, B2C, and C2C commerce at scale. Blockchain and smart contracts are key drivers of the DeFi vision, enabling secure and non-repudiable financial transactions based on the fulfillment of pre-defined conditions. However, smart contract business logic can be faulty resulting in erroneous transactions and loss of capital. Testing smart contracts and ensuring 100% correctness also remains a challenge. Finally, to realize the interoperability requirement of the metaverse as mandated by the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF), service providers shall be required to quickly scale and provide similar services across a plethora of metaverse platforms and ecosystems. Service providers also need to ensure the high availability of their DeFi services and remain resilient in the face of attacks. This research paper presents A Digital Twin Framework for smart contract-based applications for the metaverse, allowing DeFi service providers to create and maintain multiple active and passive twins of their services across metaverse platforms. Passive twins of the service can be used by prospective partners to test their smart contract execution and validate the outcomes. Passive twins can be activated dynamically to improve availability, ensure hyper-scaleup, or respond to attacks. Simulation results establish the effectiveness of the proposed framework laying the foundation for meeting the expectations for the future metaverse.