Furion: Efficient and Atomic Cross-Blockchain Transactions Through Multi-Future Exploration
Ru Cheng, Yifan Zhou, Jiang Qing Xiao, Shijie Zhang, Haoyu Dong, Hai Jin, Bo Li · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · 2026
Cross-chain transaction processing is pivotal to blockchain interoperability, enabling coordinated state transitions across multiple blockchains to support increasingly complexdecentralized applications(dApps). However, existing atomicity-preserving mechanisms, predominantly based ontwo-phase commit(2PC) protocols, are hindered by sequential coordination, prolonged state locking, and high susceptibility to cascading aborts. These limitations severely degrade throughput and latency under contention, undermining practical deployability. This paper proposes Furion, a novel cross-chain transaction processing mechanism that achieves both atomicity and efficiency. Furion introduces the multi-future exploration, a new execution paradigm that explicitly materializes multiple possible futures of cross-chain states via multi-versioning. By speculatively executing transactions across feasible state evolutions, Furion eliminates blocking on unresolved dependencies and fundamentally avoids cascading aborts. To further unlock concurrency in the finalization phase, Furion employs preemptive voting, which allows local transactions to cast commit or abort votes early when their outcomes are invariant across all state versions. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Furion significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems, achieving substantially higher throughput, lower latency, and markedly reduced abort rates under skewed and highly contended workloads.