AucSwap: A Vickrey auction modeled decentralized cross-blockchain asset transfer protocol

Abstract With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the cross-blockchain asset transfer has been in great demand. However, most existing cross-blockchain solutions encounter low efficiency problems due to the centralized features, unfriendly development environment, and difficulty in cooperation. This paper proposes an interaction protocol for secure and efficient cross-blockchain transfer process, wherein the cross-blockchain asset transfer is modeled as an auction process. We design our protocol by leveraging the atomic swap technology and Vickrey auction scheme to achieve efficient cross-blockchain asset transfer, without sacrificing the decentralized control. To achieve the transfer efficiency, we optimize the Vickrey auction scheme to share data within the auction and delivery process synchronously. This results in a efficient user information exchange. The experimental results show that not only can our protocol achieve compatibility, but it also incurs little communication overhead in high throughput. A cross-blockchain transfer process can be accomplished in average 4 rounds of interaction. The difference between the transaction completion time and the bid waiting time is less than 1 second. Besides, our protocol guarantees the exchange rate at a reasonable range. The ratio of the cross-blockchain exchange rate to the real exchange rate converges to 0.9 for approximately 200 participants. The transaction fee decreases sharply with the increase of the number of auction participants.