Seamless Asset Exchange in Interconnected Metaverses: Unraveling On-Chain Atomic Swap

Metaverse interoperability immerses users in the virtual world to interact among diverse digital environments, allowing communication, asset exchanges, asset management, and financial transactions across virtual platforms. Moreover, interoperability mandates fast, transparent, decentralized, and secure transactions to foster trusted immersive experiences that encourage more participation of users in metaverse platforms. Blockchain, a decentralized technology, supports interoperability with a cross-chain communication paradigm. However, cross-chain communication techniques such as atomic swap employ off-chain transactions, intermediaries (e.g. Vault) to lock assets or witnesses exchange, and asynchronous state updates for blockchain-to-blockchain exchanges that limit the trust, security, and faster convergence of transactions. This work proposed a novel on-chain atomic swap protocol using state synchronization-based smart contracts to provide cross-metaverse communication by transferring digital assets (cryptocurrency/Token/NFT) that outweigh the existing atomic swap limitations. In addition, the mutex-lock property of our experiment ensures security by synchronizing the states. We measure the performance with transaction cost and latency using local Ganache test networks representing two blockchain-based metaverses. Moreover, we tested ERC20 (Token) and ERC721 (NFT) based digital assets in the atomic swap to prove our hypothesis. In our test setup, the approximate overall cost of a complete exchange round is 0.013 ether, and the transaction latency is around 6 minutes, demonstrating a cheaper and faster protocol for realtime cross-metaverse communication. Finally, we discuss the stability of our work concerning race conditions, deadlock situations, and atomicity.