Excited to share that
@Theta_Network’s joint research with Prof. Xiao
@ZhenXiaoCornell’s team is being presented this week at IEEE/IFIP DSN 2026 in Charlotte, USA! 🎉
📄 ShuttleCross: An Efficient Cross-Chain Smart Contract Invocation Framework
Paper:
zhenxiao.com/papers/ShuttleC…
DSN (IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks) is one of the premier conferences in distributed systems, reliability, and networked computing, bringing together cutting-edge research on building secure, scalable, and dependable distributed infrastructure.
Our paper presents ShuttleCross, a novel framework for efficient cross-chain smart contract invocation that enables fast and reliable interoperability across heterogeneous blockchain networks while guaranteeing atomicity and serializability.
As blockchain ecosystems continue to diversify, applications increasingly need to coordinate smart contracts across multiple independent chains. Existing cross-chain protocols often suffer from high latency, excessive transaction aborts, and limited concurrency. ShuttleCross addresses these challenges through several key innovations:
-- Hybrid Concurrency Control (HCC): Dynamically combines optimistic concurrency control (OCC) and strict two-phase locking (S2PL), adapting to different contention levels to reduce transaction aborts while maximizing parallelism.
-- Read-Write Separation: Accelerates read-only cross-chain invocations through off-chain execution while preserving correctness with a dual-processing validation mechanism.
-- Efficient Cross-Chain Coordination: Extends the traditional two-phase commit (2PC) protocol with distributed deadlock detection and adaptive state management to ensure both atomicity and serializability across independent blockchains.
Experimental results show that ShuttleCross significantly improves cross-chain performance, achieving up to 58% lower latency and 55% higher throughput than GPACT, while maintaining strong correctness guarantees under realistic workloads.
This work closely aligns with Theta's vision of decentralized infrastructure. As AI, Web3, and decentralized applications increasingly span multiple blockchain ecosystems, efficient cross-chain execution will become a critical building block for scalable decentralized services. ShuttleCross provides a practical foundation for enabling high-performance interoperability without sacrificing consistency or reliability.