I’m delighted to share my paper I’ve presented at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems: ‘Be My Guest: Welcoming Interoperability into IBC-Incompatible Block­chains’.

It introduces the concept of a guest block­chain which runs on top of a block­chain and provides features necessary to support the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. This enables trustless cross-chain interoperability between blockchains which would otherwise not support IBC-based communication. We demonstrate our approach by deploying the guest blockchain on Solana connecting it to the Cosmos ecosystem with performance comparable to native IBC implementations.

Neapolitan heat notwithstanding, the conference was captivating with papers on variety of fascinating subjects. Naturally, AI was a popular topic. For example, Stephan Kleber talked about transferability of adversarial patches and Marta Kwiatkowska discussed provably correct autonomous systems. I’ve previously written about AI risks and it becomes apparent that relying on neural networks alone is insufficient for safety-critical systems.

Alas, I digress. After tumultuous history, ‘Be My Guest’ paper is now available together with the conference slides:

• IEEE Xplore entry
• The accepted paper (PDF, 286 k)
• Conference slides (PDF, 410 k)

This work is related to my articles about the Solana runtime. They describe limitations I had to content with when implementing the Solana IBC bridge:

• Solana transaction size limit
• Solana signature count limit
• Mutable global state in Solana