A Voting-Based Blockchain Interoperability Oracle

TL;DR

This paper introduces a voting-based blockchain interoperability oracle that uses threshold signatures to enable cost-effective and scalable cross-chain communication, addressing fragmentation in the blockchain ecosystem.

Contribution

It presents a novel voting-based oracle approach utilizing threshold signatures, reducing ongoing costs and improving scalability over existing relay schemes.

Findings

No ongoing costs for the oracle operation

Single signature verification on-chain reduces costs

Enhanced scalability compared to traditional relay solutions

Abstract

Today's blockchain landscape is severely fragmented as more and more heterogeneous blockchain platforms have been developed in recent years. These blockchain platforms are not able to interact with each other or with the outside world since only little emphasis is placed on the interoperability between them. Already proposed solutions for blockchain interoperability such as naive relay or oracle solutions are usually not broadly applicable since they are either too expensive to operate or very resource-intensive. For that reason, we propose a blockchain interoperability oracle that follows a voting-based approach based on threshold signatures. The oracle nodes generate a distributed private key to execute an off-chain aggregation mechanism to collectively respond to requests. Compared to state-of-the-art relay schemes, our approach does not incur any ongoing costs and since the on-chain component only needs to verify a single signature, we can achieve remarkable cost savings compared to conventional oracle solutions.