CBDC-AquaSphere: Interoperable Central Bank Digital Currency Built on Trusted Computing and Blockchain

Abstract: The adoption of decentralized, tamper-proof ledger systems is paving the way for new applications and opportunities in different contexts. While most research aims to improve their scalability, privacy, and governance issues, interoperability has received less attention. Executing transactions across various blockchains is notably instrumental in unlocking the potential of novel applications, particularly in the financial sector, where their potential would otherwise be significantly diminished. Therefore, interoperable ledgers are crucial to ensure the expansion and further adoption of such a technology in various contexts. In this paper, we present a protocol that uses a combination of trusted execution environment (TEE) and blockchains to enable interoperability over independent semi-centralized CBDC ledgers, guaranteeing the atomicity of inter-bank transfers. Our interoperability protocol uses a custom adaptation of atomic swap protocol and is executed by any pair of CBDC instances to realize a one-way transfer. It ensures features such as atomicity, verifiability, correctness, censorship resistance, and privacy while offering high scalability in terms of the number of CBDC instances. Our approach enables to possible deployment scenarios that can be combined: (1) CBDC instances represent central banks of multiple countries, and (2) CBDC instances represent the set of retail banks and a paramount central bank of a single country. We provide a detailed description of our protocol as well as an extensive analysis of its benefits, features, and security. In this WIP paper, we made a proof-of-concept implementation and made a partial evaluation, while the more extensive evaluation will be made in our future work.