General Purpose Atomic Crosschain Transactions

The General Purpose Atomic Crosschain Transaction protocol allows composable programming across multiple Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call graph of function calls is rolled back. The protocol operates on existing Ethereum blockchains without modification. It works for both public permissioned and consortium blockchains. Additionally, the protocol is expected to work across heterogeneous blockchains other than Ethereum. The protocol has been analysed in terms of Gas usage and Finalised Block Periods for three scenarios: reading a value from one blockchain to another, writing a value from one blockchain to another, and a trade finance system involving five contracts on five blockchains with a complex call graph. The initial security analysis of the protocol shows that the protocol has Safety and Liveness properties. The high gas costs and the latency of the current implementation provide a base line upon which implementation improvements of this protocol and future protocols can be measured.