Blockchain Interoperability: Towards a Sustainable Payment System

The highly fragmented blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem necessitates interoperability mechanisms as a requirement for blockchain-technology acceptance. The immediate implication of interchain interoperability is automatic swapping between cryptocurrencies. We performed a systematic review of the existing literature on Blockchain interoperability and atomic cross-chain transactions. We investigated different blockchain interoperability approaches, including industrial solutions, categorized them and identified the key mechanisms used, and list several example projects for each category. We focused on the atomic transactions between blockchain, a process also known as atomic swap. Furthermore, we studied recent implementations along with architectural approaches for atomic swap and deduced research issues and challenges in cross-chain interoperability and atomic swap. Atomic swap can instantly transfer tokens and significantly reduce the associated costs without using any centralized authority, and thus facilitates the development of a sustainable payment system for wider financial inclusion.

Which Event Happened First? Deferred Choice on Blockchain Using Oracles

First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The isolated environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the non-continual runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes the monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology.

Cross-chain deals and adversarial commerce

Modern distributed data management systems face a new challenge: how can autonomous, mutually distrusting parties cooperate safely and effectively? Addressing this challenge brings up familiar questions from classical distributed systems: how to combine multiple steps into a single atomic action, how to recover from failures, and how to synchronize concurrent access to data. Nevertheless, each of these issues requires rethinking when participants are autonomous and potentially adversarial. We propose the notion of a cross-chain deal, a new way to structure complex distributed computations that manage assets in an adversarial setting. Deals are inspired by classical atomic transactions, but are necessarily different, in important ways, to accommodate the decentralized and untrusting nature of the exchange. We describe novel safety and liveness properties, along with two alternative protocols for implementing cross-chain deals in a system of independent blockchain ledgers. One protocol, based on synchronous communication, is fully decentralized, while the other, based on semi-synchronous communication, requires a globally shared ledger. We also prove that some degree of centralization is required in the semi-synchronous communication model.

Extracting Insights From Bitcoin Transactions

Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency. It was first released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin serves as a decentralized medium of digital exchange, with transactions verified and recorded in the blockchain. The latter is a public immutable distributed ledger that operates without the need of a trusted record keeping authority or a central intermediary. It provides OLTP capabilities with both atomic transactions and data durability guarantees for blockchain transactions. Blockchain ledgers were not designed to perform analytics questions. The availability of the entire bitcoin transaction history, stored in its public blockchain, offers interesting opportunities for analyzing the transactions to obtain insights on users/entities patterns and transactions patterns. For these purposes, the authors need to store and analyze cryptocurrency transactions in a data warehouse. In this chapter, they investigate public blockchain datasets, and they overview different data models for setting up a data warehouse appliance of cryptocurrencies.

Network load traffic on MySQL atomic transaction database

Internet technology is developing very rapidly especially on the database system. Today's database has led to data that cannot be processed into the traditional way that we call big data. Some data stored on the server requires a way for the data to be valid and intact for that transaction mechanism appears on RDBMS which ensures that the data stored will become a unified whole as in customer account data, withdrawal of money at ATMs, e-transactions -commerce and so on. Of course the use of transactions in a database by not using Atomic transactions has a difference in terms of traffic on the network. This research appears by analyzing network traffic or density from a database that uses transactions and not to users who access them. This research method uses a questionnaire method by distributing questionnaires quantitatively to 300 respondents. The results of the study of approximately 300 respondents, researchers get the results that the use of transactions in databases and databases without transactions after being accessed by 300 people, the densest network is a network owned by a system that uses transaction features, this is because there is a slight increase of about 13% of traffic when compared to a network without transactions. This statement shows that two-way communication from a database that has the transaction provides feedback to the user so that the data is reliable as an indicator that the data has been stored safely. Further research can be done by finding other information or a study of big data using the atomic transaction model.

PathShuffle: Credit Mixing and Anonymous Payments for Ripple

The I owe you (IOU) credit network Ripple is one of the most prominent alternatives in the burgeoning field of decentralized payment systems. Ripple’s path-based transactions set it apart from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Its pseudonymous nature, while still maintaining some regulatory capabilities, has motivated several financial institutions across the world to use Ripple for processing their daily transactions. Nevertheless, with its public ledger, a credit network such as Ripple is no different from a cryptocurrency in terms of weak privacy; recent demonstrative deanonymization attacks raise important concerns regarding the privacy of the Ripple users and their transactions. However, unlike for cryptocurrencies, there is no known privacy solution compatible with the existing credit networks such as Ripple. In this paper, we present PathShuffle, the first path mixing protocol for credit networks. PathShuffle is fully compatible with the current credit networks. As its essential building block, we propose PathJoin, a novel protocol to perform atomic transactions in credit networks. Using PathJoin and the P2P mixing protocol DiceMix, PathShuffle is a decentralized solution for anonymizing path-based transactions. We demonstrate the practicality of PathShuffle by performing path mixing in Ripple.