Rollback-Free Cross-Chain Atomicity Through Forward-Only Correction

2026-07-18

AI Summary

In immutable blockchain environments, conventional atomic protocols relying on rollbacks struggle to support cross-chain smart contract operations. This work proposes a rollback-free forward-correction mechanism that resolves pending operations by appending on-chain transactions, thereby achieving decentralized cross-chain atomicity through state-lock timeouts, local state contention control, and independent outcome validation on each chain. By eliminating the need for a central coordinator, the proposed approach effectively addresses two fundamental challenges in cross-chain smart contract coordination across heterogeneous blockchains: state custody during execution and confirmation of cross-chain outcomes. The design provides a practical foundation for general-purpose atomic cross-chain operations.

Abstract

Blockchain platforms have grown into an ecosystem of independent networks, and a growing class of applications now requires smart contracts on separate chains to act as one. Such operations must be atomic, yet immutability makes this fundamentally harder: a confirmed transaction cannot be reversed, so the rollback on which classical atomic commitment protocols depend is unavailable. Two challenges follow. Contract state must be held across an operation whose outcome is not yet known, and each chain's execution outcome must be established even though no chain can observe another. In response, we introduce a framework that achieves atomicity through forward-only correction, resolving incomplete operations with new on-chain transactions rather than reversal. The framework bounds how long contract state is held and confines contention to the state an operation touches, and it establishes outcomes from an on-chain record of what each chain executed, without relying on any single coordinating party. This work lays the foundation for atomic coordination of general smart contract operations across heterogeneous blockchains.

Problem

• cross-chain
• atomicity
• blockchain
• smart contracts
• immutability

Innovation

• cross-chain atomicity
• forward-only correction
• smart contracts
• blockchain interoperability
• atomic commitment