LFX Mentorship Showcase 2023

Blockchain interoperability has the potential to unlock magnitudes more value from the disparate and siloed layer-one ecosystems, functionally doing for the industry what the Hypertext Transmission Protocol (HTTP) did for the fledgling internet. The prior art for cross-chain transactions primarily involved utilization of bridges as the most popular choice, with atomic cross-chain swaps following suit. However, the fundamental security limits of bridges and the string of recent exploits block mass-adoption. In this talk, we propose "Byzantine Swaps": a novel iteration of trustless cross-chain atomic swaps with greater security guarantees as an alternative to classical bridges and to advance security-centric interoperability developments in Blockchain R&D. Under this mentorship, I have worked under Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Dhinakaran Vinayagamurthy, Krishnasuri Narayanam, and Sandeep Nishad from IBM Research. I had a very positive experience under their guidance, learning much about interoperability, while learning balance between theoretically sound protocol design vs. practical industry implementation. I learned about Typescript, Go, Hyperledger Weaver, and Cross-Chain swaps.