Description 

The emergence of blockchain interoperability is reducing the risk of investing in blockchain by avoiding vendor lock-in, leveraging interoperation with off-chain systems, and providing a truly open ecosystem, enabling a network of blockchains. Our Hyperledger Summer Internship last year explored the semantic level of interoperability - what are the processes that blockchain interoperability requires and how are end-users interacting with it. 

In particular, in the technical report we wrote, we designed a survey aimed to understand the socio-technical challenges that blockchain interoperability poses, with the goal of offering a unique opportunity to link the underlying technology with human experience and values. We discovered that end-users are particularly concerned with visualizing and analyzing cross-chain cost and throughput, with some indication that measuring energetic expenditure in the cross-chain setting would also be valuable.

Following that survey, we implemented a simple PoC that obtains transaction receipts from different blockchains and aggregates them in a unified repository. This project aims to build on top of what was done and create a cross-chain model (taking into account what end-users what to analyze from such model) automatically from input cross-chain transactions.

This project will take a cross-chain use case,  create a model and allow end-users to extract relevant metrics, promoting a better understatement of the business logic running on multiple blockchain infrastructures, and of interoperability.

Additional Information

https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/Do_You_Need_a_Distributed_Ledger_Technology_Interoperability_Solution_/18786527/1

https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/A_Framework_to_Evaluate_Blockchain_Interoperability_Solutions/17093039

Visualization and Analysis of Cross-chain Transactions (and its references)

Learning Objectives

This internship intends to yield a fruitful learning experience, across several dimensions:

•  Study the state of the art for blockchain interoperability in the light of the Hyperledger Foundation projects and initiatives, namely Hyperledger Cactus.

• Research the concept of cross-chain state and what are the interesting analysis techniques one could apply to cross-chain models.

• Open-source and teamwork: You will learn how to contribute to an open-source project, and also document your work; You will be aware of the main efforts of the Hyperledger technologies, and how blockchain interoperability relates to that; You will interact with the Hyperledger community

• Technical: You will refine your understanding of blockchain technology; You will strengthen your understanding of blockchain interoperability, taking a step forward to become an expert; You will refine your programming skills, both in client-side applications and in chaincode

Expected Outcome

• 1 ) Open source Implementation, testing, and documenting the set of technological artifacts required to create and analyze a cross-chain model
• 2) Scientific paper (or technical report) on the achieved results, that can be used to disseminate the knowledge created on this internship

Relation to Hyperledger 

Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Cactus (other Hyperledger projects might be added)

Education Level

Masters or Ph.D. level students are preferred. Experience in scientific research is recommended (but not required).

Skills

Must:

• Willing to contribute to a meaningful mission, in an open-source mentality
• Teamwork skills, as synergies and cooperations with other parts, are needed to successfully complete the project
• Understanding of blockchain technology

Nice to have: 

• Research experience (if you don’t, no worries - we can help!)
• Experience with Typescript/Docker
• Understanding of blockchain interoperability (please refer to the recommended papers)

Future plans

The end of the internship does not need to mean an end to your collaboration. The idea is for the mentee to be connected to the Hyperledger’s ecosystem, contributing to blockchain interoperability solutions.

Preferred Hours and Length of Internship

Full-time is preferable.

Mentor(s) Names and Contact Info

Name: Rafael Belchior

Company affiliation: Blockdaemon & INESC-ID, Técnico Lisboa

Chat ID (Discord): rafaelapb#6679

Name: Rui Cruz

Company affiliation: , Senior Member IEEE, Researcher at INESC-ID, Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Name: Peter Somogyvari

Company affiliation: Accenture

Chat ID (Discord): peter_somogyvari#3365