Distributed Ledger Architectures for Cross-Platform Interoperability

Abstract

The blockchain ecosystem is fragmented. Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and dozens of smaller platforms each maintain their own state, their own consensus, and their own smart contract runtimes -- and none of them talk to each other natively. For enterprises building multi-party workflows that span organisations on different platforms, this fragmentation is not a theoretical inconvenience but a concrete barrier: a supply chain that runs on Fabric cannot settle payments on Ethereum without a bridge, and bridges have been the source of over USD 2.8 billion in exploits since 2021. We present the Cross-Platform Interoperability Architecture Framework (CPIAF), a systematic evaluation of five interoperability approaches -- atomic swaps, hash time-locked contracts, relay chains, notary schemes, and sidechain bridges -- tested across six platform pairs using real cross-chain transaction workloads. We introduce the Interoperability Quality Score (IQS) covering security guarantees, transaction latency, asset generality, trust assumptions, and operational complexity. Our findings show that relay-chain architectures (IBC, XCMP) achieve the highest IQS at 0.908, while notary schemes offer the fastest deployment path for enterprises that cannot wait for relay infrastructure. We also quantify, for the first time, the security-latency trade-off curve across all five approaches on identical workloads.