New blockchains are introduced at a staggering rate. In order to secure or backup one's assets stored in one chain or to attach value to assets stored in an isolated chain, it often becomes necessary to transfer assets from one chain to another. This transfer has to be reliable and fault tolerant such that assets are transferred without being lost, duplicated, or corrupted. One could argue that a transactional semantic, well-known from (distributed) databases, would suffice. However, the decentralized nature of blockchains and the modus operandi of blockchains impose additional challenges to reliably executing transactions that straddle the boundaries of different chains. Cross-chain integration abstractions are often also referred to as bridges between chains.
This thesis explores the analysis of the cross-chain integration problem, develops a conceptual framework to prescribe the properties a bridge needs to meet, assesses existing bridge designs according to these properties and develops a bridge for a given set of blockchains.
Qualifications: Background in distributed systems, databases, blockchains and distributed ledger technology, strong analytical abilities, and good knowledge of the Rust programming language.