2023/06/16 by Daniël Reijsbergen, Aung Htein Maw, Reijsbergen, Daniël +7
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Caching and Content Delivery #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Digital Platforms and Economics #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.09735
openalex publication_date 2023/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A plethora of different blockchain platforms have emerged in recent years, but many of them operate in silos. As such, there is a need for reliable cross-chain communication to enable blockchain interoperability. Blockchain interoperability is challenging because transactions can typically not be reverted - as such, if one transaction is committed then the protocol must ensure that all related transactions are committed as well. Existing interoperability approaches, e.g., Cosmos and Polkadot, are limited in the sense that they only support interoperability between their own subchains, or require intrusive changes to existing blockchains. To overcome this limitation, we propose PIEChain, a general, Kafka-based cross-chain communication framework. We utilize PIEChain for a practical case study: a cross-chain auction in which users who hold tokens on multiple chains bid for a ticket sold on another chain. PIEChain is the first publicly available, practical implementation of a general framework for cross-chain communication.