Fine-Grained and Class-Incremental Malicious Account Detection in Ethereum via Dynamic Graph Learning

Abstract

Ethereum serves as the cornerstone for value transfer in Web 3.0, providing a decentralized and efficient trust mechanism for global connectivity. However, the anonymity of Ethereum undermines market regulatory capabilities, leading to frequent malicious behaviors such as Ponzi Scheme, Money Laundering, and Phishing. Therefore, in the face of the diverse and continuously emerging malicious behaviors, implementing fine-grained detection is crucial for maintaining the prosperous development of the blockchain ecosystem. In this paper, we propose FiMAD, a fine-grained and class-incremental malicious account detection framework based on dynamic graph learning. Specifically, we first propose a general graph structure calledDynamic Account Relation Graph (DARG), which dynamically models Ethereum accounts from a continuous-time perspective. Then, we design a cascade graph feature extraction method to capture deep temporal evolution patterns and neighbor interaction features in DARG. Next, we construct a pre-training universal encoder to transform account features into high-dimensional embeddings, followed by fine-tuning the model classifier with a few labeled samples, enabling accurate fine-grained detection and rapid updates for incremental classes. We conduct extensive experiments using real Ethereum data. The results demonstrate that FiMAD outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in fine-grained detection across five typical scenarios: class-incremental, full data, new malicious accounts, imbalanced data, and binary classification. In the class-incremental scenario, FiMAD improves the Macro-F1 by up to 26.4% compared to SOTA methods.