OTEx: Ownership Transfer and Execution Protocol for Blockchain Interoperability

Abstract

While the demand for decentralized applications working across multiple blockchains has increased, Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) is yet to see a generalized and unified protocol. This is due to the diverse types of IBC use cases and the lack of interoperability among blockchains. This paper raises two issues: 1) the necessity of sender and recipient's accounts in both source and destination blockchains, and 2) the lack of auditability of IBC transactions between the two blockchains and even more in the future. This paper introduces a novel concept, “Ownership Transfer and Execution (OTEx),” for blockchain interoperability. OTEx allows a user on the source blockchain to transfer the ownership of an asset to a recipient on the destination blockchain while the asset remains on the source blockchain. The recipient can execute this ownership to spend the asset on the source blockchain. OTEx introduces Gateway and Auxiliary Blockchain to enable the IBC protocol for OTEx transactions and ensure the auditability of transaction attempts. The proof-of-concept implementation of OTEx was developed and tested for token ownership transfer and execution between two local Ethereum blockchains. The evaluation of the proposed system shows that OTEx successfully solves the issues and acts as a viable interoperability solution using ownership of an asset.