Towards Application Portability on Blockchains

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenge of incentive mismatch in public blockchains and proposes application portability as a solution, presenting middleware designs to facilitate migration between blockchains.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of application portability on blockchains and provides middleware design examples to support cross-chain migration.

Findings

Middleware designs enable application migration between blockchains

Portability can mitigate incentive mismatch issues

Proposed solutions support private blockchain applications

Abstract

We discuss the issue of what we call {\em incentive mismatch}, a fundamental problem with public blockchains supported by economic incentives. This is an open problem, but one potential solution is to make application portable. Portability is desirable for applications on private blockchains. Then, we present examples of middleware designs that enable application portability and, in particular, support migration between blockchains.