The difference in the implementation of the underlying technology between the various public chains has brought big obstacles to inter-chain technology. Inter-chain needs to solve several difficult problems:
Ensure inter-chain information is true and reliable
The transaction information on the original chain is external information for another chain. How to ensure that this external information enters the other chain is correct is an important part of the entire inter-chain mechanism. For example, there is no finality on the blockchain of the POW mechanism, because there is always a fork in the entire network of the POW mechanism, but the probability gradually becomes smaller as the confirmation speed increases.
Since the blockchain may fork, multiple parts of the transaction are packaged into the block, the chain can be reorganized, and the block can also be changed to an orphan block. In this case, it may cause partial success and partial failure of the Inter-chain transaction, that is to say Unreal transactions entered the chain.
Atomicity of inter-chain transactions
The blockchain can be seen as a state machine for distributed consensus maintenance. The state machine completes state transfer through transaction execution. Inter-chain interoperability should trigger a double-issue state transfer, that is, both interoperable chains have executed transactions, and the state after the transaction is executed is consistent. A inter-chain transaction will cause the state of two chains or more chains to change, and these changes are either successful or unsuccessful, which is atomic.
For example, the double payment problem of inter-chain transactions. When a part of the transaction processing stops, the entire transaction can be canceled without a certain failure and partial success. Part of the failure is the failure to guarantee atomicity, which has caused double payment problems.
The difficulty in ensuring atomicity in inter-chain technology is that the two sides of the inter-chain are two independent chains, which may have different consensus mechanisms, data structures, transaction processing and other logic, resulting in the transaction not being finally executed.
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