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Thesis Defence: HotGate: Trustless Cross-chain Settlement Protocol
November 30, 2022 at 1:15 pm - 4:15 pm
Mahyar Daneshpajooh, supervised by Dr. Chen Feng, will defend their thesis titled “HotGate: Trustless Cross-chain Settlement Protocol” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering.
An abstract for Mahyar’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public.
If you would like to attend this virtual defence please contact the supervisor at chen.feng@ubc.ca to receive a zoom link.
ABSTRACT
The concept of blockchain was introduced by Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin enabled users to make payments in a fully-decentralized manner. In the past decade, researchers and engineers leveraged the Bitcoin idea and proposed blockchains with different characteristics (such as level of security, privacy, and decentralization), each focusing on a particular area. One way to classify blockchains is based on their programmability. A programmable blockchain enables developers to run their programs on top of it. This way, the execution of programs becomes decentralized so no one can manipulate the result. Currently, many decentralized applications (dApps) are built on top of programmable blockchains such as exchanges, lending protocols, etc. Bitcoin, although its promising security, doesn’t have the programming capability to build dApp on it.
In this work, we introduce HotGate, a trustless cross-chain settlement protocol that enables users to move BTC from Bitcoin to other programmable blockchains. So users can leverage their BTC in dApps of other blockchains. Moreover, Hot-Gate enables users to exchange their BTC for assets that exist on these blockchains. HotGate uses Relay, a fully-decentralized interoperability solution that connects blockchains directly together. This makes Hotgate a trustless protocol that is aligned with blockchain values. Moreover, HotGate introduces two mechanisms that enable users to move BTC in a fast and private manner, which are the weaknesses of the Bitcoin blockchain.
