Design space and pitfalls: blockchain interoperability

This multistage collaboration aims at providing secure, robust, and highly efficient solutions to enable peer-to-peer communications across chains. This project will be the first stage to bootstrap this collaboration. In this project, we will explore the design space and pitfalls of blockchain interoperability, and propose potential improvements and optimisations. We will conduct a comprehensive analysis on the possible mechanisms to enable communication across blockchains, including their strength, weakness, performance, potential attacks, and the open challenges. For example, the security of different blockchains relies on different set of assumptions. When they are communicating with each other, the security assumption of an individual blockchain may not be compatible with the other. How to still guarantee the security of cross-chain operations is a great concern. We will then select two chains to perform a case study based on our analysis.