A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends

By Rafael Belchior, André Vasconcelos, Sérgio Guerreiro, Miguel Pupo Correia. ACM Computing Surveys, 2020

657 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blockchain interoperability is emerging as one of the crucial features of blockchain technology, but the knowledge necessary for achieving it is fragmented. This fact makes it challenging for academics and the industry to achieve interoperability among blockchains seamlessly. Given this new domain’s novelty and potential, we conduct a literature review on blockchain interoperability by collecting 284 papers and 120 grey literature documents, constituting a corpus of 404 documents. From those 404 documents, we systematically analyzed and discussed 102 documents, including peer-reviewed papers and grey literature. Our review classifies studies in three categories: Public Connectors, Blockchain of Blockchains, and Hybrid Connectors. Each category is further divided into sub-categories based on defined criteria. We classify 67 existing solutions in one sub-category using the Blockchain Interoperability Framework, providing a holistic overview of blockchain interoperability. Our findings show that blockchain interoperability has a much broader spectrum than cryptocurrencies and cross-chain asset transfers. Finally, this article discusses supporting technologies, standards, use cases, open challenges, and future research directions, paving the way for research in the area.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fc7efedf1403009416b564a7e10fc96991b3197

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

  1. Zehui Xiong
  2. Jiawen Kang
  3. Madhusanka Liyanage
  4. Xuemin Shen
  5. Qiang Yang
  6. Chunyan Miao
  7. Dusist Niyato

In Information Systems

  1. Dusist Niyato
  2. Zehui Xiong
  3. Jiawen Kang
  4. Madhusanka Liyanage
  5. Minrui Xu
  6. Xuemin Shen
  7. Qiang Yang
  8. Chunyan Miao

Citations in the corpus