Rollback-Free Cross-Chain Atomicity Through Forward-Only Correction
Cryptography and Security
Summary
The authors explain that blockchain systems are made of separate networks, but sometimes apps need smart contracts on different chains to work together all at once, which is hard because blockchains don’t allow undoing confirmed actions. To fix this, the authors propose a new method that avoids reversing transactions by making corrections through new transactions moving forward. Their approach keeps the contract data stable only for a limited time and figures out what happened on each chain using records on the chains themselves, without needing a central controller. This helps multiple blockchains work together smoothly for complex operations.
Authors
Tahrim Hossain, Faisal Haque Bappy, Tarannum Shaila Zaman, Tariqul Islam
Abstract
Blockchain platforms have grown into an ecosystem of independent networks, and a growing class of applications now requires smart contracts on separate chains to act as one. Such operations must be atomic, yet immutability makes this fundamentally harder: a confirmed transaction cannot be reversed, so the rollback on which classical atomic commitment protocols depend is unavailable. Two challenges follow. Contract state must be held across an operation whose outcome is not yet known, and each chain's execution outcome must be established even though no chain can observe another. In response, we introduce a framework that achieves atomicity through forward-only correction, resolving incomplete operations with new on-chain transactions rather than reversal. The framework bounds how long contract state is held and confines contention to the state an operation touches, and it establishes outcomes from an on-chain record of what each chain executed, without relying on any single coordinating party. This work lays the foundation for atomic coordination of general smart contract operations across heterogeneous blockchains.