Towards Interoperability of Open and Permissionless Blockchains: A Cross-Chain Query Language

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cross-chain query language inspired by SQL to enable interoperable data access across multiple open and permissionless blockchains, addressing current fragmentation issues.

Contribution

It presents a novel cross-chain query language, data model, and architecture, with a prototype demonstrating its feasibility for blockchain interoperability.

Findings

Prototype implementation validates cross-chain data access

Language abstracts blockchain differences for seamless querying

Contributes to blockchain interoperability discussions

Abstract

The rise of open and permissionless blockchains has introduced novel platforms for applications based on distributed data storage. At the application and business levels, long-established query languages such as SQL provide interoperability that can be complemented by blockchain-based data storage today, enabling permissionless and verifiable data storage along with decentralized execution across tens of thousands of nodes. However, when accessing one or more blockchains, interoperability is not provided today, posing challenges such as inhomogeneous data access in addition to different features and trade-offs, e.g. in data and distribution, scalability, and security. Towards interoperability in data access among the increasing number of blockchain platforms, this paper introduces a cross-chain query language for data access across blockchains. Similar to SQL, the language abstracts from implementation based on a data model compatible with the largest open and permissionless blockchains (OPB) today. The language, data model, and processing architecture are demonstrated and evaluated with an implemented prototype, aiming to contribute to the discussion on blockchain interoperability among OPB.