Blockchain Interoperability

Abstract

Blockchain is one of the most disrupting technologies in recent years and has been used in several domains, such as health, supply chain and finance. In addition, organisations started integrating their blockchains with other blockchains or other external software systems. However, this is challenging for blockchain systems as interoperability is not a native design feature. Several academic and industrial efforts were performed to enable blockchain interoperability in the last years, but they were proposed for specific domain scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, there is not a general-purpose interoperability solution that enables blockchain interoperability. This research project aims to define a general-purpose blockchain interoperability framework to enable blockchain interoperability. This framework will comprise methods, guidelines, specifications and software pieces that ease interoperability between blockchains. This paper presents this research project, describing its research questions, the adopted and projected research methodologies, preliminary results and its current status.