With the advancement of blockchain technology, there is an increasing demand for blockchain interoperability solutions that enable fast and secure data exchange between blockchains developed through diverse processes. However, such solutions are often tailored to specific use cases, underscoring the need for more versatile and standardized protocols. Efficient inter-blockchain communication is critical for the scalability and usability of blockchain ecosystems, enabling seamless integration across diverse networks. In response to this demand, initiatives such as the Cosmos ecosystem have emerged, aiming to achieve enhanced security and faster interoperability. The Cosmos ecosystem utilizes the inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol to enable seamless interaction between heterogeneous blockchains. This study examines the IBC protocol, the core interoperability technology within the Cosmos ecosystem, and evaluates the transaction transfer times of IBC. The evaluation utilized real blockchain data to measure the distribution of transfer times, using approximately 50,000 transactions originating from Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. The findings reveal the statistical characteristics of IBC token transfer times within the Cosmos ecosystem. Specifically, in the IBC transfers from Cosmos Hub to Osmosis, the IBC transfer time distribution exhibits a peak at approximately 15 s, while the Gumbel or Fréchet distribution yields the lowest Akaike Information Criterion value, depending on the IBC section. Moreover, the results of this study confirm that IBC transfer performance has improved compared to the experiments conducted in June 2022. These findings provide insights for optimizing the performance of IBC and guiding future enhancements to improve cross-chain communication within blockchain networks.

Since the initial appearance of Bitcoin, a wide variety of blockchain projects have been proposed. With an increased demand for exchanging cryptocurrencies between blockchains, it has become important for blockchains to achieve crosschain interoperability, which is the property of storing and fetching information from each other on multiple blockchains. However, public blockchains have a scalability problem of an extremely slow transaction processing capacity. Based on this background, we have considered solving the scalability problem by enhancing the crosschain interoperability. In this paper, we propose a chainless multi-layer consensus, which is a more decentralized method compared to existing blockchain projects when taking into consideration the interoperability, including Polkadot and Cosmos. We conducted some experiments using our implemented node program to evaluate the latency times required to achieve a consensus. As a result of the experiments using a large-scale network constructed with more than 100 parachains, we confirmed that the latency times tend to increase superlinearly when the number of parachains increases to parallel transaction processing. By applying this result, we can estimate the blockchain settings for safely executing a chainless multi-layer consensus while achieving a practical transaction processing capacity.