Isaac Sheff
isheff.bsky.social
Isaac Sheff
@isheff.bsky.social
Senior Research Scientist, Heliax.dev
Chimera chains are intended to "make the easy thing easy." When a set of chains have a lot of overlap, it should be fast and easy to do cross-chain transactions, and with Chimera chains, it will be. Any questions? Come discuss on the forum. 9/9
Discussion: Typhon's Chimera Chains
We recently published a blog post on Chimera Chains, a feature of Anoma’s Typhon ordering and execution engine. Chimera Chains generalize shared sequencers. They use a consensus based on Heterogene...
research.anoma.net
September 21, 2023 at 9:23 PM
In the blog post, we detail what it means to keep or lose atomicity, what atomicity guarantees we can expect will be available in the wild, and future generalizations of Chimera Chains. We also discuss communication within atomic bundles, which shared sequencers can use too. 8/9
September 21, 2023 at 9:22 PM
In particular, Chimera chains solve the "deciding which consensus to execute" problem. We explicitly partition state to specify what multi-chain transactions are possible at any time. All partitions retain the full guarantees of their base chain. 7/9
blog.anoma.net/heterogeneou...
September 21, 2023 at 9:22 PM
Chimera chains run on Heterogeneous Paxos, which provides specific guarantees for when these bundles will remain atomic. More overlap between trust models strengthens this atomicity guarantee. We discussed Heterogeneous Paxos in an earlier post. 6/9
Heterogeneous Paxos and Multi-Chain Atomic Commits | Blog - Anoma
Heterogeneous Paxos exploits the high intersection between validator sets of different blockchain to create a heterogeneous consensus protocol for atomic multi-chain transactions & extends the capabil...
anoma.net
September 21, 2023 at 9:20 PM
Like shared sequencers, Chimera Chains commit atomic bundles of transactions to each base chain. Unlike shared sequencers, chimera chains are still possible when the base chains' trust models are different. 5/9
September 21, 2023 at 9:19 PM
We discuss some problems with the traditional "trustless" multi-phase commit solution in an earlier post.

Other solutions involve a trusted third party, or, if both chains share exactly the same trust model, a shared sequencer. 4/9

anoma.net/blog/heterog...
www.umbraresearch.xyz/writings/sha...
Heterogeneous Paxos and Multi-Chain Atomic Commits | Blog - Anoma
Heterogeneous Paxos exploits the high intersection between validator sets of different blockchain to create a heterogeneous consensus protocol for atomic multi-chain transactions & extends the capabil...
anoma.net
September 21, 2023 at 9:18 PM
This brings us to a classic example in cross-domain atomic transactions: the user wants a train ticket if and only if they can also get a hotel room. They want to run these transactions atomically. If they get one, and then the other becomes unavailable, the user will be sad. 3/9
September 21, 2023 at 9:17 PM
We've been studying transactions with heterogeneous trust. Ultimately, Anoma's Typhon engine will allow anyone to boot up a blockchain / replicated state machine with their own trust model (stake token, PoW system, source of authority: some method of choosing quorums). 2/9
September 21, 2023 at 9:15 PM