A Gateway-based Interoperability Solution for Permissioned Blockchains

Abstract

During the last years, interoperability has become one of the main challenges within blockchain research as blockchains increasingly require integration between each other. Indeed, blockchains work by design in silos of information as interoperability is not a native feature. The main efforts in the field target permissionless blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, interoperability in permissioned blockchains remains as an almost untouched area of work as they introduce additional requirements focusing on privacy and identity. Although there are some interoperability solutions for permissioned blockchains, they are either high-level design proposals not providing concrete implementations or focus on interoperability issues between business applications and blockchain platforms. In this paper we propose a gateway-based platform-to-platform interoperability solution for permissioned blockchains, which comprises a detailed solution design and a reference implementation. The proposal was assessed through the development of a social security case scenario, based on the reference implementation and using two blockchain platforms: Hyperledger Fabric and Corda.