Trustworthy Systems

Feasibility of cross-chain payment with success guarantees

Authors

Rob van Glabbeek, Vincent Gramoli and Pierre Tholoniat

DATA61

University of Sydney

UNSW Sydney

Abstract

We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows—implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract—successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain payment problems did not require this success, or any form of progress. We demonstrate that it is possible to solve this problem when assuming synchrony, in the sense that each message is guaranteed to arrive within a known amount of time, but impossible to solve without assuming synchrony. Yet, we solve a weaker variant of this problem, where success is conditional on the patience of the participants, without assuming synchrony, and in the presence of Byzantine failures. We also discuss the relation with the recently defined cross-chain deals.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{vanGlabbeek_GT_20,
    address          = {Virtual event},
    author           = {van Glabbeek, Robert and Gramoli, Vincent and Tholoniat, Pierre},
    booktitle        = {32nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 2020},
    date             = {2020-7-14},
    doi              = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3350755.3400264},
    keywords         = {Cross-chain payment protocols; distributed systems; fault tolerance; blockchain; asynchronous
                        networks of timed automata; asynchronous communication; clock skew; safety and liveness properties;
                        cross-chain deals.},
    month            = jul,
    pages            = {579-581},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/full_text/vanGlabbeek_GT_20.pdf},
    publisher        = {ACM},
    title            = {Feasibility of Cross-Chain Payment with Success Guarantees},
    year             = {2020}
  }

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