Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange Using Trusted Hardware

We propose Tesseract, a secure real-time cryptocurrency exchange service. Centralized exchange designs are vulnerable to theft of funds, while decentralized exchanges cannot offer real-time cross-chain trades. All the existing exchanges are also vulnerable frontrunning attacks. Tesseract overcomes these flaws by using a trusted execution environment, specifically Intel SGX. The task of committing the recent trades data to independent cryptocurrency systems presents an all-or-nothing fairness problem, that can be solved by means of SPV proofs or multiple SGX-enabled servers. Tesseract also mitigates denial-of-service attacks by running a consensus protocol among SGX-enabled servers. Tesseract supports not only real-time cross-chain cryptocurrency trading, but also a secure method to tokenize assets pegged to various cryptocurrencies. For instance, Tesseract-tokenized bitcoins can circulate on the Ethereum blockchain for use in smart contracts. We provide a reference implementation of Tesseract that supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, and similar cryptocurrencies.