HCNCT: A Cross-chain Interaction Scheme for the Blockchain-based Metaverse

As a new type of digital living space that blends virtual and reality, Metaverse combines many emerging technologies. It provides an immersive experience based on VR technology and stores and protects users’ digital content and digital assets through blockchain technology. However, different virtual environments are often highly heterogeneous in terms of underlying architecture and software implementation technology, which leads to many challenges in scalability and interoperability for blockchains serving the Metaverse. Cross-chain technology is an essential technology to realize the scalability and interoperability of blockchain. However, the current cross-chain technologies all have their own merits and demerits, and there is no cross-chain solution that can be fully applied to any scenario. To this end, in the blockchain-based Metaverse, this article proposes a cross-chain transaction scheme based on improved hash timelock, HCNCT. By combining the notary mechanism, this scheme uses a group of notaries to supervise and participate in cross-chain transactions, effectively solving the problem that malicious users create a large number of time-out transactions to block the transaction channel, which exists in the traditional hash timelock method. Besides, this article uses the verifiable secret sharing method in the notary group, which can effectively prevent the centralization problem of the notary mechanism. Moreover, this article discusses the process of key processing, cross-chain transaction and transaction verification of the scheme, and designs the user credibility evaluation mechanism, which can effectively reduce the occurrence of malicious default of users. Compared with existing solutions, our solution has the advantage of effectively addressing time-out transaction attacks and centralization issues while guaranteeing security. The experiments also verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.