Design Principles for Interoperability of Private Blockchains

Abstract

Interoperability is one of the most promising research areas of blockchain technologies. When state-of-the-art solution architectures are designed, interoperability is expected to address many business challenges and speed up time to market. We see many digital transformation projects integrated with interrelated business processes to improve business performance. In the meantime, we see many businesses and industry solutions that are also built using blockchain technologies. Most of these blockchain solutions are running as stand-alone industry processes as a common practice. There is an increasing demand to interconnect and interoperate these blockchain solutions to enable end-to-end tracking and visibility. This demand also brings the need for the standardization of blockchain interoperability. Until now, we see most of the interoperability research projects concentrating on interconnecting 2 independent blockchain networks or they are mostly built for public cryptocurrency blockchain networks. Most of these projects have less or minimum standardization approaches and do not provide critical business privacy requirements. Part of these research projects is also breaking the general decentralized architecture of blockchain in many ways. Our proposed architectural approach and design principles are aiming to serve as a foundation for future private interoperability projects. Our proposed solution is using smart contracts to design a publish & subscribe architecture. This architecture can be used to integrate 2 or more private blockchains at smart contracts level.