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A Review of Blockchain Interoperability and Its Current Solution

Authors:
Muhammad Firdaus at Pukyong National University
Muhammad Firdaus
Kyung-Hyune Rhee
Kyung-Hyune Rhee
Kyung-Hyune Rhee
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Abstract

In the past ten years, blockchain has gained popularity as an emerging disruptive technology to provide better security on data sharing among many parties in a decentralized approach. Blockchain is considered to become the key technology for the next generation of cybersecurity ecosystem. However, the current blockchain landscape is still fragmented, in which most of the existing blockchain networks are operating in silos. In this sense, they act as a standalone environment isolated without communicating with each other. Hence, interoperability becomes a critical functionality issue to facilitate broad blockchain adoption providing cross-blockchain interaction and makes it challenging for academia and industry to overcome these issues. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of blockchain interoperability on the current solutions. We observe some published works in defining the architecture of blockchain interoperable and its implementation. In the last section of this paper, we explore several challenges, use cases, and future research directions.
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한국정보보호학회 동계학술대회 논문집 Vol. 30, No. 2
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한국정보보호학회 동계학술대회 논문집 Vol. 30, No. 2
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한국정보보호학회 동계학술대회 논문집 Vol. 30, No. 2
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한국정보보호학회 동계학술대회 논문집 Vol. 30, No. 2
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... The fundamental types of interoperability to be achieved for enterprise digitalisation comprises syntactic interoperability, semantic interoperability and structural interoperability as seen in Figure 1. Syntactic interoperability describes the packaging and transmission structures for data communication and exchange among two or more systems irrespective of the systems having different interface and programming languages (Firdaus and Rhee 2020). In DLTs, syntactic interoperability involves the ability of distributed ledgers to speak with each other based on specified communication protocols and data formats. ...
... It is seen as the key infrastructure for the next generation of digital ecosystem because the data saved are unalterable and tamper resistant. Moreover, DLTs support other characteristics, such as transparency, trustful transactions, anonymity, decentralisation, etc. by eliminating intermediaries (Firdaus and Rhee 2020;Lipton and Hardjono 2021). ...
... They are deployed as stand-alone, isolated without connecting and sharing data with other legacy platforms (Hardjon, Lipton, and Pentland 2020;Srivastava, Zhang, and Eachempati 2021). Hence, interoperability has become an important functionality that can enable broad DLT adoption facilitating cross-DLT interaction (Firdaus and Rhee 2020). Interoperability of DLT also aims to enable communication among DLT platforms without restrictions (Firdaus and Rhee 2020). ...
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Digitalization is important to realize enterprise sustainability, where processes, data, systems, and stakeholders are in a seamless connected environment. Presently, to achieve enterprise digitalization technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) has now been deployed to support digital services provided by enterprises. Hence, there is significant interest in the adoption of DLT to offer better visibility of data among several stakeholders and systems in a decentralized peer-to-peer topology. But several challenges in DLTs remain to be addressed, including the interoperability, standardization, and integration of DLTs. Similarly, research on DLT interoperability is scarce and this has hindered the wide-spread adoption of DLTs, and interoperability is a critical requirement for the resilience and scalability of DLTs. However, almost all DLTs are siloed apart from a few DLTs such as Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum, most DLTs are deployed for specific applications and typically do not communicate and interact with each other. Hence there is need to explore how interoperability of DLTs such as IOTA Tangle can be achieved with legacy systems. Therefore, this study provides theoretical and practical understanding of DLT interoperability and identified the factors that influence the interoperability of DLTs. Also, an architecture that shows how interoperability can be achieved in DLTs and legacy systems grounded by Application Programming Interface (API) standardization is presented. A case study is presented based on the applications of IOTA Tangle in the architecture for buying and selling of energy showing the potential of DLT for enterprise digitalization. The findings from the case study are modelled in ArchiMate to illustrate the applicability of the architecture for a realistic use case that depicts how IOTA Tangle and API are implemented to support a digital energy marketplace.
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