Your Trust, Your Terms: A General Paradigm for Near-Instant Cross-Chain Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Di, Liu, Jingyu, Wang, Xuechao, Liu, Jian, Xue, Yingjie, Ren, Kui, Chen, Chun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wu, Di
Liu, Jingyu
Wang, Xuechao
Liu, Jian
Xue, Yingjie
Ren, Kui
Chen, Chun
author_facet Wu, Di
Liu, Jingyu
Wang, Xuechao
Liu, Jian
Xue, Yingjie
Ren, Kui
Chen, Chun
contents Cross-chain transactions today remain slow, costly, and fragmented. Existing custodial exchanges expose users to counterparty and centralization risks, while non-custodial liquidity bridges suffer from capital inefficiency and slow settlement; critically, neither approach guarantees users a unilateral path to recover assets if the infrastructure fails. We introduce the Delegated Ownership Transfer (DOT) paradigm, which decouples key ownership from value ownership to enable secure, high-performance cross-chain payments. In DOT, a user deposits funds into a sandboxed on-chain Temporary Account (TA) (value ownership) while delegating its private key (key ownership) to an abstract Trusted Entity (TE). Payments and swaps are thus reframed as near-instant, off-chain ownership handoffs. Security follows from dual guarantees: the TE's exclusive control prevents double-spending, while a pre-signed, unilateral recovery transaction ensures users retain ultimate authority over their assets. Building on this foundation, we design a novel off-chain atomic swap that executes optimistically in near real time and remains fair even if the TE fails. We formalize the security of DOT in the Universal Composability framework and present two concrete instantiations: a high-performance design based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and a cryptographically robust variant leveraging threshold cryptography. Our geo-distributed prototype shows that cross-chain payments complete in under 16.70 ms and atomic swaps in under 33.09 ms, with costs fully decoupled from Layer-1 gas fees. These results provide a practical blueprint for building secure, efficient, and interoperable cross-chain payment systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_15191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Your Trust, Your Terms: A General Paradigm for Near-Instant Cross-Chain Transfer
Wu, Di
Liu, Jingyu
Wang, Xuechao
Liu, Jian
Xue, Yingjie
Ren, Kui
Chen, Chun
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Cross-chain transactions today remain slow, costly, and fragmented. Existing custodial exchanges expose users to counterparty and centralization risks, while non-custodial liquidity bridges suffer from capital inefficiency and slow settlement; critically, neither approach guarantees users a unilateral path to recover assets if the infrastructure fails. We introduce the Delegated Ownership Transfer (DOT) paradigm, which decouples key ownership from value ownership to enable secure, high-performance cross-chain payments. In DOT, a user deposits funds into a sandboxed on-chain Temporary Account (TA) (value ownership) while delegating its private key (key ownership) to an abstract Trusted Entity (TE). Payments and swaps are thus reframed as near-instant, off-chain ownership handoffs. Security follows from dual guarantees: the TE's exclusive control prevents double-spending, while a pre-signed, unilateral recovery transaction ensures users retain ultimate authority over their assets. Building on this foundation, we design a novel off-chain atomic swap that executes optimistically in near real time and remains fair even if the TE fails. We formalize the security of DOT in the Universal Composability framework and present two concrete instantiations: a high-performance design based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and a cryptographically robust variant leveraging threshold cryptography. Our geo-distributed prototype shows that cross-chain payments complete in under 16.70 ms and atomic swaps in under 33.09 ms, with costs fully decoupled from Layer-1 gas fees. These results provide a practical blueprint for building secure, efficient, and interoperable cross-chain payment systems.
title Your Trust, Your Terms: A General Paradigm for Near-Instant Cross-Chain Transfer
topic Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15191