Blockchain Papers

Alicia Amores, Gabriel M. Ramírez V., Fernanda Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, Jaime Díaz-Arancibia · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Júlia Almeida Valadares, Saulo Moraes Villela, Heder Soares Bernardino, Alex Borges Vieira

No abstract is available for this record.

Ye Tian, Liangliang Song, Yuanyuan Ma, Yanbin Wang · 7 authors

Detecting fraudulent accounts on Ethereum is critical for securing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems. Although temporal transaction dynamics offer richer behavioral signals than static graphs, existing methods struggle to jointly model the continuous, directional, and community-level nature of fraudulent fund flows. Specifically, they inadequately capture two key cues: directional-temporal transaction patterns (integrating directionality and temporal dynamics) and higher-level behavioral communities formed by accounts with similar transactional and temporal traits.To address these, we propose TimeTrace, an unsupervised graph representation learning framework for fraud detection in Ethereum transaction networks. TimeTrace models temporal behaviors via a Directed Temporal Aggregation mechanism that explicitly distinguishes incoming and outgoing flows while adaptively emphasizing recent interactions to capture pattern evolution. Building on these directional representations, TimeTrace further incorporates a differentiable clustering module to identify latent behavioral communities and encode cluster-level relational semantics. To enhance representation coherence and structural consistency, we introduce Cohesive Embedding Regularization (CER)—a graph refinement objective combining a global Laplacian term for structural consistency, an intra-cluster Laplacian term for cluster compactness, and a fidelity term to retain initial clustering information. Additionally, we construct a new phishing account benchmark with up-to-date Ethereum transaction records for realistic evaluation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that TimeTrace outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, achieving F1-score improvements of 3.62\%-10.83\% and inference speeds at least as fast as the quickest baseline.

Zhen Chen, Fang Zhou, Bo Liu, Haixia Long · 5 authors

In recent years, phishing scams have become one of the most rampant criminal activities on Ethereum, causing significant financial losses to investors and disruptions to the Ethereum ecosystem. Existing phishing scam detection methods typically model Ethereum transaction records as graphs, extracting features from paired nodes based on the topological relationships. However, these methods mostly focus on low-order relational aspects, neglecting higher-order structural information in the network. In this paper, we propose a new method — Ethereum Phishing Scam Detection by Higher-Order Topology (EPSD-HOT), which improves phishing scam detection performance by mining higher-order topological features from the network. We conduct experiments on a public dataset and a crawled real-world dataset, extracting ten subgraphs with distinct network characteristics. The experimental results show that the average AUC-ROC for the ten subgraphs is 0.9970, with improvements ranging from 0.0181 to 0.1658 compared to baseline methods. This indicates that our approach is highly robust and can effectively detect phishing scams across different subgraphs while overcoming the issue of class imbalance. By incorporating higher-order structural information into node features, this work offers new insights for enhancing phishing scam detection in Ethereum.

Akshara Alagarsamy, Naveenbalaji Gowthaman

DharmaCoin is an artificial intelligence-based cyber fraud detection system that is supposed to establish a safe and moral online financial system. The suggested model enables combining blockchain security, fraud detection with the use of artificial intelligence, biometric multi-factor authentication, and secure document verification to enhance the safeguarding of digital financial crimes. It has a framework built on the values of Indian philosophies based on logic, transparency, and ethical governance and in the name of responsible and trust-worthy digital finance. DharmaCoin manages to identify transaction fraud with a 97% F1-score and forged/altering documents with 99% accuracy in using state-of-the-art technologies SatyaAI, a real-time deepfake and identity-checking tool, and RishiGuard, an anomaly financial activity detecting tool, in 200 milliseconds. The system uses a Proof-of-Stake blockchain registry to ensure unalterable records of transactions, and to increase the level of transparency within financial deals. Performance checks show that the blockchain infrastructure has the capability of handling a rate of transactions of over 1000 transactions in less than five minutes as well as be able to verify transactions in less than five seconds hence scaling to high financial volume environments. A Pilot project involving a banking partner found that a reduction of up to 40 in time to process KYC manually led to a faster approach to operations and better fraud detection. In general, DharmaCoin offers a safe, transparent, sustainable digital finance system, which is a moral and tech-centered solution to the prevention of cyber fraud and promotes the trustful financial ecosystem in accordance with the global sustainability development objectives.

Pankhuri Gupta, Akshat Sinha, Harsh Rawat, Aaditya Kumar Jha · 5 authors

The rapid growth of Ethereum blockchain transactions has led to increased vulnerability to fraudulent activities. Traditional rule-based detection systems fail to capture complex and evolving fraud patterns. This paper presents an unsupervised deep learning approach using an Autoencoder to model normal transaction behavior and detect anomalies based on reconstruction error. The model is trained on normal transactions and evaluated on a dataset of 9,841 Ethereum accounts with 45 features. The system achieves a recall of 78.7%, precision of 69%, F1-score of 0.74, and ROC-AUC of 0.70. The proposed approach demonstrates the effectiveness of unsupervised learning for fraud detection without requiring labeled datasets.

Wei Zhong

With the rapid development of financial technology and the digital economy, fraud detection in financial transactions faces increasing challenges due to complex transaction networks, temporal dependencies, and nonlinear interactions.This study proposes an RL-LGNN framework that integrates long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, graph neural networks (GNN), and reinforcement learning (RL) for fraud detection in the financial transaction settlement process.LSTM is used to encode historical transactions as temporal sequences and extract time-dependent behavioural features.GNN then models inter-node transaction relationships and captures structural information from the transaction graph.On this basis, RL is introduced to dynamically optimise the detection strategy, thereby improving model adaptability and robustness.Experimental results on both public and real-world datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms conventional methods and achieves fraud detection accuracy above 90%.The proposed framework provides an effective solution for fraud detection in financial transaction settlement.

Wanshui Song, Jingwen Tan, Huanran Wang, Shuai Han · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ahod Alghuried, David Mohaisen, David Mohaisen

Phishing attacks pose significant risks to the Ethereum ecosystem, comprising over 50% of Ethereum-related cybercrimes, leading to the emergence of many machine learningbased defenses.This paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing machine learning-based phishing detection in Ethereum transactions.The framework addresses critical aspects such as feature selection, class imbalance, model robustness, and algorithm optimization.By systematically evaluating the strengths and limitations of existing approaches, we highlight gaps in current practices, particularly in feature manipulation and unsustainable performance outcomes.Through both analytical and experimental assessments, we demonstrate the framework's ability to streamline detection techniques, improving generalization and model effectiveness.Our findings emphasize the importance of refining detection strategies to meet the evolving challenges posed by sophisticated phishing schemes in the blockchain space.

Weixin Xie, Qihao Chen, Kexin Zhu, Chen Feng · 5 authors

As stablecoins become increasingly prevalent in financial crimes, their usage for illicit activities has reached a scale of USD 51.3 billion. Detecting phishing activities within stablecoin transactions has emerged as a critical challenge in blockchain security. Currently, existing detection methods predominantly target mainstream cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and lack specialized models tailored to the unique transaction patterns of stablecoin networks. This paper introduces a deep learning framework, BERTSC, based on multi-modal fusion. The model integrates three core modules graph convolutional networks (GCNs), BERT semantic encoders, and soft prompt encoders to identify malicious accounts. The GCN constructs directed multi-graph representations of account interactions, incorporating multi-dimensional edge features; the BERT encoder transforms discrete transaction attributes into semantically rich continuous vector representations; the soft prompt encoder maps account interaction features into learnable prompt vectors. An innovative three-way gated dynamic fusion mechanism optimally combines the information from these sources. The fused features are then classified to predict phishing account labels, facilitating the detection of phishing scams in stablecoin transaction datasets. Experimental results on large-scale stablecoin datasets demonstrate that BERTSC outperforms baseline models, achieving improvements of 4.96%, 3.60%, and 4.23% in Precision, Recall, and F1-score, respectively. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each module and confirm the necessity and superiority of the three-way gating fusion mechanism. This research offers a novel technical approach for phishing detection within blockchain stablecoin ecosystems.

Dongwu Lin

This paper develops computational methods for optimizing revenue recognition in machine learning platforms operating on cloud computing infrastructure. We analyze how Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) platforms leverage distributed computing architectures, containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), and microservices patterns to deliver AI capabilities, creating complex revenue recognition challenges under IFRS 15. Our research employs algorithmic analysis to examine five critical technical challenges: (1) computational resource allocation tracking across multi-tenant cloud environments, (2) real-time transaction price determination using usage metering APIs and consumption-based billing algorithms, (3) automated revenue allocation across platform components using distributed ledger technologies, (4) temporal revenue recognition optimization through event-driven architectures and streaming data processing, and (5) network effect quantification using graph algorithms and data analytics.

Chi-Han Chen, Shui-Chuan Chen, Wen Chieh Hsu

BPN), MATLAB, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) In this study, we investigate Bitcoin price volatility from December 15, 2014 to January 29, 2024 using an integrated, multisource feature set and an optimization-learning pipeline that couples Taguchi orthogonal arrays with a backpropagation network (BPN) implemented in MATLAB.Publicly available market variables were prioritized and nonquantifiable exogenous shocks were not modeled; Taguchi screening identified critical predictors and simultaneously tuned control factors (network specification, hidden-neuron count, and currency inclusion), after which the BPN was trained on aligned weekly (n = 573) and monthly (n = 108) datasets to ensure cross-market comparability.Model accuracy, assessed by mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), improved substantially after Taguchi-guided selection and configuration-weekly MAPE decreased from 3.23% to 0.36% and monthly MAPE from 6.32% to 0.07%demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed optimization framework.Out-of-sample forecasts for February-April 2025 achieved predominantly sub-10% MAPE, while high-error instances were analyzed and attributed to contributing factors, yielding decision-relevant insights for practitioners and researchers.Collectively, the results show that systematic variable selection and orthogonal-array-based model design materially enhance neural forecasts of cryptocurrency prices and provide a reproducible pathway to accurate, time-efficient prediction.

Shaik Jeelani Basha, Pragya, Shreya Majumdar, Ayushi Prasad · 6 authors

In recent years, blockchain technologies such as Ethereum have secured widespread adoption, yet they have also become increasingly targeted by fraudulent activities. Discovering these fraudulent patterns is challenging due to the complexity and size of transaction data. This study investigates the application of the XGBoost algorithm, a gradient boosting technique optimized for performance plus scalability, in discovering fraudulent transactions on the Ethereum network. The model is instructed to distinguish between valid as well as suspicious behaviour based on transactional and behavioural characteristics by examining a dataset of Ethereum transaction records. XGBoost is a popular machine learning algorithm used for a range of tasks, including fraud detection on Ethereum and other blockchain networks. It is a highly effective model due to its performance, flexibility, and ability to handle complex, imbalanced, as well as large datasets. This study emphasises accuracy and precision, also recalling key metrics, demonstrating that XGBoost not only enhances prediction performance but also minimizes false positives over other classification algorithms. Our findings: XGBoost is the optimal model for real-time fraudulent detection in a blockchain context. The accuracy of the XGBOOST algorithm achieves a high level of accuracy.

Mohammed Alhayani, Wisam Hazım Gwad, Shahab Wahhab Kareem, Moustafa Fayad

The increasing use of blockchain smart contracts has introduced new security challenges, as small coding errors can lead to major financial losses. While rule-based static analyzers remain the most common detection tools, their limited adaptability often results in false positives and outdated vulnerability patterns. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods for smart contract vulnerability detection using the BCCC-SCsVuls-2024 benchmark dataset. Six models (Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors, Simple and Deep Multilayer Perceptron, and Simple and Deep one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks) were evaluated under a unified experimental framework combining RobustScaler normalization and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. Our experimental results from a five-fold cross-validation show that the Random Forest classifier achieved the best overall performance with an accuracy of 89.44% and an F1-score of 93.20%, outperforming both traditional and neural models in stability and generalization. PCA-based feature analysis revealed that opcode-level features, particularly stack and memory manipulation instructions (PUSH, DUP, SWAP, and RETURNDATASIZE), were the most influential in defining contract behavior.

Dhivyalakshmi Venkatraman, Manikandan Kuppusamy

<p>The rapid evolution of decentralized finance (DeFi) has brought revolutionary innovations to global financial systems; however, it has also revealed some major security vulnerabilities, especially of smart contracts. Traditional auditing methods and static analysis tools are prone to fail in identifying sophisticated threats, including reentrancy attacks, front-running, oracle manipulation, and honeypots. This review discusses the growing role of machine learning (ML) in enhancing the security of DeFi systems. It provides a comprehensive overview of modern ML-based methods related to the detection of smart contract vulnerabilities, transaction-level fraud detection, and oracle trust assessment. The paper also provides publicly available datasets, necessary toolkits, and architectural designs used for developing and testing these models. Additionally, it provides future directions like federated learning, explainable AI, real-time mempool inspection, and cross-chain intelligence sharing. While it is full of promise, the application of ML in DeFi security is plagued by issues like data scarcity, interoperability, and explainability. This paper concludes by highlighting the need for standardised benchmarks, shared data initiatives, and the integration of ML into development pipelines to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable DeFi ecosystems.</p>

Jiarong Lu, Bin Liao, Yi Liu, Kutorzi Edwin Yao

Ethereum has become a significant trading platform for financial activities such as Dapps, ICOs, and DeFi. However, it has also become a hub for criminal activities such as fraud, money laundering, and illicit fundraising. The construction of fraud detection models employing machine learning techniques is currently a mainstream research direction. Nevertheless, existing studies face significant challenges, including class imbalance in data samples and a lack of model interpretability. In this content, this work proposes a novel explainable model for Ethereum illicit account detection, ETHIAD (Ethereum Illicit Account Detection). Firstly, we pre-process the dataset by ADASYN oversampling and Lasso feature selection, etc., to more efficiently achieve feature modeling of transaction structures. Then, the ETHIAD model is trained using the XGboost algorithm, with an accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and AUC value of 99.70%, 99.51%, 99.02%, 99.26%, and 99.45%, respectively, the model outperforms the existing SOTA model by 0.05%-1.1%. Finally, we introduce SHAP framework to analyze the key influencing factors of illicit accounts from multiple perspectives, and the conclusions strongly enhance the explainability of the model.

Просолов, Владислав, Кушнерьов, Олександр, Сокол, Владислав, Трофименко, Руслан

Topicality. Fraudulent activities on the Ethereum blockchain pose a substantial risk to decentralized finance and require capable models not only to respond to already detected abuses but also to identify suspicious accounts proactively before losses escalate. The subject of study is the application of graph and temporal neural models to the task of classifying Ethereum accounts as benign or fraudulent, considering the structural relationships between addresses and the temporal dynamics of transactions. The purpose of this article is to develop and experimentally evaluate a neural architecture based on a multilayer perceptron as a baseline component for the subsequent integration of graph and temporal mechanisms, and to analyze its performance on the open Ethereum Fraud Detection dataset, which features a high-class imbalance. The following results were obtained. A baseline deep model for binary account classification was constructed using feature preprocessing, stratified data splitting, class weight balancing, L2 regularization, Dropout, and early stopping, which enabled the achievement of an ROC AUC value of approximately 0.98 under conditions of a pronounced dominance of the safe class. A detailed analysis of the confusion matrix and the precision, recall, and F1 metrics demonstrated an acceptable trade-off between reducing false positives and minimizing the proportion of missed fraudulent accounts, which is critical for real-world financial scenarios. Conclusion. The results indicate that a properly designed baseline neural model on tabular features can ensure high-quality proactive identification of fraudulent Ethereum accounts and serve as a starting point for further integration of graph and temporal architectures aimed at improving interpretability and robustness to the evolution of malicious behavior patterns.

Vladyslav Prosolov, Oleksandr Kushnerov, Vladyslav Sokol, Ruslan Trofymenko

Topicality. Fraudulent activities on the Ethereum blockchain pose a substantial risk to decentralized finance and require capable models not only to respond to already detected abuses but also to identify suspicious accounts proactively before losses escalate. The subject of study is the application of graph and temporal neural models to the task of classifying Ethereum accounts as benign or fraudulent, considering the structural relationships between addresses and the temporal dynamics of transactions. The purpose of this article is to develop and experimentally evaluate a neural architecture based on a multilayer perceptron as a baseline component for the subsequent integration of graph and temporal mechanisms, and to analyze its performance on the open Ethereum Fraud Detection dataset, which features a high-class imbalance. The following results were obtained. A baseline deep model for binary account classification was constructed using feature preprocessing, stratified data splitting, class weight balancing, L2 regularization, Dropout, and early stopping, which enabled the achievement of an ROC AUC value of approximately 0.98 under conditions of a pronounced dominance of the safe class. A detailed analysis of the confusion matrix and the precision, recall, and F1 metrics demonstrated an acceptable trade-off between reducing false positives and minimizing the proportion of missed fraudulent accounts, which is critical for real-world financial scenarios. Conclusion. The results indicate that a properly designed baseline neural model on tabular features can ensure high-quality proactive identification of fraudulent Ethereum accounts and serve as a starting point for further integration of graph and temporal architectures aimed at improving interpretability and robustness to the evolution of malicious behavior patterns.

Surendran, Roopak

Hackers may create malicious solidity programs and deploy it in the Ethereum block chain. These malicious smart contracts try to attack legitimate programs by exploiting its vulnerabilities such as reentrancy, tx.origin attack, bad randomness, deligatecall and so on. This may lead to drain of the funds, denial of service and so on . Hence, it is necessary to identify and prevent the malicious smart contract before deploying it into the blockchain. In this paper, we propose an ML based malicious smart contract detection mechanism by analyzing the EVM opcodes. After balancing the opcode frequency dataset with SMOTE algorithm, we transformed opcode frequencies to the binary values (0,1) using an entropy based supervised binning method. Then, an explainable AI model is trained with the proposed binary opcode based features. From the implementations, we found that the proposed mechanism can detect 99% of malicious smart contracts with a false positive rate of only 0.01. Finally, we incorporated LIME algorithm in our classifier to justify its predictions. We found that, LIME algorithm can explain why a particular smart contract app is declared as malicious by our ML classifier based on the binary value of EVM opcodes.

Sijie Cheng, Yanbo Yang, Jiawei Zhang, Pengfei Li

As fraud patterns in the Ethereum ecosystem become increasingly sophisticated, traditional detection methods face limited generalization capability and insufficient interpretability. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess powerful semantic understanding and reasoning abilities, their direct application in fraud detection still suffers from critical issues, including inadequate domain knowledge integration and scarcity of high-quality interpretable training data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Large Language Model for Transaction Anomaly Detection (LLM-TAD), a framework that constructs interpretable training data through a dual interpretation strategy combining XGBoost with SHAP/LIME to provide complementary feature-level insights, and achieves domain knowledge injection and capability optimization via a two-stage approach involving supervised fine-tuning and instruction fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a fraud detection accuracy of 93.01% and an explanation quality (BERTScore) of 0.7939, achieving synergistic improvement in both accuracy and interpretability.

Zulian Wahid, Suryo Adhi Wibowo, Andry Alamsyah

The growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) demands advanced fraud detection, yet current methods face a trade-off: tabular models lack semantic understanding, while language models like RoBERTa struggle with structured data and high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel pipeline that transforms structured Ethereum transaction data into natural language sentences, enabling a standard RoBERTa model to analyze financial behavior efficiently using Gradient Accumulation. A stratified 5-fold cross-validation on a public dataset revealed a key performance trade-off: while Random Forest achieved the highest F1-Score (0.796), our RoBERTa GA model proved superior in the critical metric of Recall (0.769). This finding validates our semantic approach not merely as a competitive alternative, but as a strategically advantageous method when the primary goal is minimizing missed fraudulent transactions. Our work confirms the viability of applying NLP to blockchain security and provides a foundation for future language-model-driven monitoring systems.

Ambica Sethy, Abhishek Ray

No abstract is available for this record.

Ruoyu Bai, Meng Wang, Wanqing Liu, Liang Wang

In recent years, deep learning has been widely applied in smart contract vulnerability detection due to its automatic feature extraction and strong generalization capabilities. However, existing methods still face challenges such as redundant information in graph structures, insufficient utilization of data flow information, and single-scale feature extraction. To address these issues, we propose a function-level smart contract graph representation, namely the Multi-relational Semantic Graph (MSG), which employs various types of data flow edges to represent data dependency information within contracts. Subsequently, we introduce a detection model, REA_DCN, which combines a Residual Multi-scale Dilated Convolutional Network with a Multi-head Attention mechanism to capture syntactic and semantic features in the MSG. The model comprises two key modules: the Residual Multi-scale Dilated Convolutional Network (RE_DCN) can extract node features from three different dimensions, while the Multi-head Attention Network (MEA) is utilized for edge feature extraction. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the highest score of REA_DCN in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score exceeds 97%, proving its effectiveness and feasibility.

M. K. Ghosh, Raju Halder, Joydeep Chandra

The decentralized and anonymous nature of Ethereum makes it a prime target for phishing scams. These scams account for nearly 50% of all blockchain-related fraud, thereby causing a substantial financial loss and eroding user trust. Unlike conventional phishing, Ethereum phishing users exploit user anonymity, lack of awareness, and market-driven dynamics to deceive normal users. Despite of a plethora of research in this direction, there is a lack of a rigorous and comprehensive survey which can fortify an insightful comparison of the existing works and provide a concrete future research guidance. To this end, this paper presents a systematic review of 90 studies published between 2020 and 2024, offering the following novel contributions, (1) Structured Taxonomy: We introduce a structured three-fold taxonomy that classifies existing methods into feature engineering-based, representation learning-based, and fusion-based frameworks. (2) Theoretical Analysis: Through theoretical analysis, we evaluate these approaches against the critical research challenges, such as rapid network dynamism, data leakage, and network sparsity and provide a comparative mapping of novel techniques adopted across the studies. (3) Empirical Evaluation: We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of 14 representative models over multiple public datasets to assess their robustness under varying data conditions. The findings indicate that while feature-based models are more interpretable, they struggle with temporal adaptability; representation learning approaches, particularly GNN-based models, capture complex behavioral patterns but are computationally demanding and less explainable. Fusion methods demonstrate the most balanced trade-off between accuracy, scalability, and interpretability. (4) Future Research Guidance: Finally, we identify still persisting issues such as network sparsity, behavioral volatility, and scalability, and outline future research directions emphasizing temporal graph reasoning, self-supervised fusion, and explainable AI for developing transparent and deployable phishing detection frameworks on Ethereum.