Sourena Khanzadeh, Daniel Platnick, Marjan Alirezaie, Hossein Rahnama
Modern AI systems bring societal risks such as mass surveillance, extreme concentrations of power, and loss of user autonomy---calling into question a model where third-parties collect and control massive amounts of user data. Users require a sovereign system to securely own, govern, and disclose their context while remaining compliant across regulated domains with strict provenance, interpretability, and policy adherence. Perspective-aware AI approaches this by transforming a user's aggregated personal data into a structured identity model called a \emph{Chronicle}: a temporal knowledge graph that represents and grows with the user. Chronicles support the secure disclosure of context across federated networks. A Chronicle holder may expose a queryable, authorized view that a third-party agent may consult without centralizing anyone's data. This paper explores the problem of minimum-necessary disclosure across domain boundaries: when a requester's agent queries a Chronicle, how can the system constrain its response to release only what the requester's relationship, stated purpose, and specific task require? We propose \textbf{Provenance Preserving Chronicles} (PPC), a federated protocol that compiles each holder's Chronicle into a compact \emph{authorized evidence subgraph} governed by one rule: \emph{share no more than the request requires}. Holders keep local sovereignty; an access controller projects relationship-aware views over domain-expert ontologies; and a two-phase flow returns provenance-linked text first, releasing raw artifacts only after explicit holder approval. We frame the problem, map gaps in blockchain, P2P, and holder-sovereign designs, define the core constructs, and sketch the protocol with an explicit threat model.
Sai Srikanth Madugula, Peplluis Esteva De La Rosa, Daya Shankar
The rapid proliferation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence fundamentally disrupts traditional customer loyalty paradigms. As AI evolves from passive recommendation algorithms to autonomous, goal-directed agents capable of executing purchasing decisions, the conventional understanding of consumer-brand relationships requires a structural reevaluation. By synthesizing extant literature across human-machine teaming, consumer decision-making, and algorithmic trust dynamics, we demonstrate that traditional loyalty models fail to account for algorithmic bounded rationality and constructed autonomy. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) model. We formalize brand choice via a softmax probability formulation where human emotional equity, agentic machine-experience utility, calibrated trust, delegated authority, and verifiable execution jointly determine selection. The model features recursive updating mechanisms to dynamically calibrate trust and delegation after each interaction. Crucially, the framework integrates a verifiable execution layer for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and tokenized loyalty settings, incorporating execution risks -- such as gas costs, slippage, MEV exposure, and smart-contract vulnerabilities -- as core predictors of agentic brand preference. Furthermore, we introduce the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS), an auditable, risk-weighted metric designed to measure human-agent alignment using human feedback, execution logs, benchmark comparisons, and verifiable receipts. Finally, we propose a comprehensive three-stage empirical validation plan spanning controlled shopping experiments, multi-agent market simulations, and DeFi testbeds. This framework provides the foundational theory required for brands to navigate the impending transition toward machine customers.
Sai Srikanth Madugula, Peplluis Esteva De La Rosa, Daya Shankar
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols currently rely on heuristic, utilization-based bonding curves that mandate severe over-collateralization, systematically excluding under-collateralized assets like corporate invoices. This paper introduces a mathematically optimal pricing mechanism for decentralized credit: the Reverse Kelly Automated Market Maker (rkAMM), the core engine of our proposed lending framework. By inverting the Kelly Criterion, traditionally used for optimal bet sizing, we construct a dynamic interest rate discovery protocol that explicitly prices individual loan risk. The rkAMM ingests real-time Probability of Default (PD) streams from an off-chain Explainable AI oracle and dynamically calculates the exact interest rate required to sustain target liquidity provider (LP) yields. We mathematically derive the Reverse Kelly pricing function ($r = \frac{y + PD}{1 - PD}$), proving its strictly convex superiority over Aave and Compound's static utilization curves in managing capital efficiency. Furthermore, we deploy the rkAMM architecture via Solidity smart contracts, optimizing for gas-efficient 1e18 (WAD) floating-point arithmetic. To ensure decentralized transparency, our simulation infrastructure leverages MLflow for tracking yield hyperparameters, Data Version Control (DVC) linked to DagsHub for versioning Real-World Asset (RWA) data arrays, and localized edge-inference via Ollama (Llama-3) and Hugging Face (FinBERT) for zero-cost predictive modeling. Monte Carlo simulations across 10,000 macroeconomic stress scenarios confirm that the rkAMM maintains protocol solvency and stabilizes LP yields at 12-15\% net of expected credit losses. This work provides the foundational financial engineering required to bridge the \$2 trillion global supply chain finance gap using permissionless blockchain infrastructure.
Despite the promise of decentralization, measurement studies have identified a conspicuous lack of decentralization in blockchains. Centralization has been observed in almost all layers of the blockchain, in decentralized applications, and in decentralized autonomous organizations. In many cases, it is practically impossible to definitively determine the extent of centralization in the system. While multiple works have proposed methods to decrease centralization, by and large blockchains continue to be significantly centralized. In this paper, we develop a general framework for building verifiably decentralized blockchain systems. Our framework is motivated by the core observation that the richness and diversity of collaborative interactions between users -- rather than resource uniformity -- captures the essence and extent of decentralization in a blockchain system. Existing blockchains do not have any incentive mechanisms to encourage inter-coalition collaboration, which directly contributes to centralization. We propose a novel reward design that incentivizes users to collaborate with other users without forming isolated coalitions. Technically, our method uses a Sybil-resistant asymmetric Shapley value for reward attribution within a collaboration group, and the theory of expander graphs for measuring and enforcing decentralization. Our framework is general and can be adapted to alleviate centralization in any layer, application, or decentralized organization. It also has important implications beyond the topic of centralization. For example, we show that our solution can naturally address the blockchain scalability problem. We also identify a new class of decentralized collaborative applications that have hitherto been unexplored in blockchains.
Understanding and predicting how social beliefs evolve in response to events -- from policy changes to scientific breakthroughs -- remains a fundamental challenge in social science. Given LLMs' commonsense knowledge and social intelligence, we ask: Can LLMs model the dynamics of social beliefs following social events? In this work, we introduce the concept of the Social World Model (SWM), a general framework designed to capture how social beliefs evolve in response to major events. SWM learns state-transition functions for social beliefs by mining temporal patterns in social data and optimizing the evidence lower bound, without the need for explicit human annotations linking events to belief shifts, or for expensive census data. To evaluate SWM, we introduce a benchmark, SWM-bench, derived from real-world prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket. SWM-bench includes over 12k data points for social belief prediction tasks spanning diverse domains such as politics, finance, and cryptocurrency. Our experimental results show that SWM significantly outperforms time-series foundation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on Kalshi data and demonstrating competitive performance on Polymarket data, while offering interpretable insights into the underlying mechanisms of social belief dynamics.
Recent innovation theories on economics remain largely grounded in assumptions of hierarchical firms and closed organizational boundaries, offering limited insight into how innovation unfolds within decentralized, digitally native organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent an emerging form of innovation ecosystem characterized by blockchain-based transparency, open participation, and token-driven governance, in which sustainability can be embedded directly into organizational design. This study compares two standards, ERC-8004 and Google A2A, who address the same agent interoperability question, while the former is governed by DAO and the latter by corporation consortium. They are examined through an LLM-powered comparative pipeline for large-scale governance discourse analysis, integrating automated annotation, neural topic modeling, and multi-layer network analysis to study socio-technical power structures. The study provides evidence-based insights for scholars, policymakers, and designers seeking to align innovation, technological governance, and sustainability in future organizational forms.
Sequential trust detection in rating networks relies on continuous observation models that fail on real data. On Bitcoin-OTC, 56\% of ratings take a single value under standard mapping, breaking the distributional assumptions that parametric detectors require. This paper makes three contributions. It derives a Bayes-optimal F1 detection ceiling for per-node sequential detectors using empirically measured observation parameters. At Bitcoin-OTC's median in-degree of 2, this ceiling falls to 0.451 for strategic attacks, explaining why unsupervised methods cluster near $F1 \approx 0.4$. The analysis shows that detector-model matching, not information content, determines performance: binary models retain 86\% of mutual information while enabling exact parametric fit. A dual-regime architecture is presented where Bernoulli CUSUM detects behavioral shifts and triggers asymmetric scoring. Ablation reveals a co-design constraint: the modulation mechanism improves AUC by 0.030 on binary observations but degrades it by 0.094 on continuous observations. The combined system achieves AUC 0.749 on Bitcoin-OTC and 0.796 on Bitcoin-Alpha, beating GaaSTrust on all 8 attacks ($p < 0.003$), with founder-label AUC of 0.999.
Deep Nath, Paolo Tasca, Nikhil Vadgama, Marco Alberto Javarone
Quantifying structural stress in transaction networks requires metrics that capture structural organization beyond transaction volume alone. In this work, we introduce the Inefficiency Metric, a deterministic indicator designed to characterize the routing structure of capital flows in decentralized systems. Using Principal Component Analysis and Pearson correlation matrices computed from a six-year Hedera transaction dataset, we identify two dominant and largely independent structural dimensions: the effective diameter, related to the spatial extension of transaction propagation, and the closeness centrality, associated with the efficiency of network-level flow processing. The proposed metric reveals significant topological fluctuations associated with major macroeconomic and ecosystem-level events. Increased inefficiency is observed during periods marked by intermediary fragmentation or rapid smart-contract expansion, whereas lower inefficiency corresponds to phases of network compaction during market stress or institutional concentration. Comparison with a seven-dimensional Isolation Forest approach shows that the metric effectively captures severe multidimensional anomalies while preserving a clear structural interpretation. Overall, these results provide a physics-inspired framework for relating the large-scale organization of decentralized transaction networks to observable economic dynamics.
Simone Antonelli, Vincent Davis, Harrison Rush, Anthony Potdevin · 7 authors
The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which locks the involved capital for an extended period and degrades network reliability. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting channel closure types from publicly available gossip data, framing it as a temporal link classification task over the evolving channel graph. We construct a dataset spanning over two years of LN activity and benchmark a range of machine learning approaches, from MLPs to temporal graph neural networks and spectral encodings. Our experiments reveal that the dominant predictive signals are temporal and behavioural, namely how recently each endpoint was active and the per-node history of past closures, while the surrounding network topology provides no additional benefit. We find that a simple MLP operating on edge-level features, node-level event counts, and temporal patterns outperforms all graph-based approaches, and discuss how the inherent privacy of the LN, where critical information such as channel balances and payment flows remains hidden, fundamentally limits the predictability of closures from gossip data alone. We publicly release the dataset and code at https://github.com/AmbossTech/ln-channel-closure-prediction.
Moltbook, a Reddit-style social platform launched in January 2026 for AI agents, has attracted over 2.3 million posts and 14 million comments within its first two months. We analyze a dataset of 2.19 million posts, 11.25 million comments, and 175,036 unique agents collected over 61 days to characterize activity on this agent-oriented platform. Our central finding is that the platform is not one community but two: a transactional layer, comprising 62.8% of all posts, in which agents execute token minting protocols (primarily MBC-20), and a discursive layer of natural-language conversation. The platform's headline metrics -- 2.3 million posts, 14 million comments -- substantially overstate its social function, as the majority of activity serves a token inscription protocol rather than communication. These layers are populated by largely separate agent groups, with only 3.6% overlap -- and among overlap agents, 58% begin with transactional activity before migrating toward discourse. We characterize the discursive layer through unsupervised topic modeling of all 815,779 discursive posts, identifying 300 topics dominated by themes of AI agents and tooling, consciousness and identity, cryptocurrency, and platform meta-discussion. Semantic similarity analysis confirms that agent comments engage with post content above random baselines, suggesting a thin but genuine conversational substrate beneath the platform's predominantly financial surface. We release the full dataset to support further research on agent behavior in naturalistic social environments.
The consensus that GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, and EvolveGCN outperform feature-only baselines on the Elliptic Bitcoin Dataset is widely cited but has not been rigorously stress-tested under a leakage-free evaluation protocol. We perform a seed-matched inductive-versus-transductive comparison and find that this consensus does not hold. Under a strictly inductive protocol, Random Forest on raw features achieves F1 = 0.821 and outperforms all evaluated GNNs, while GraphSAGE reaches F1 = 0.689 +/- 0.017. A paired controlled experiment reveals a 39.5-point F1 gap attributable to training-time exposure to test-period adjacency. Additionally, edge-shuffle ablations show that randomly wired graphs outperform the real transaction graph, indicating that the dataset's topology can be misleading under temporal distribution shift. Hybrid models combining GNN embeddings with raw features provide only marginal gains and remain substantially below feature-only baselines. We release code, checkpoints, and a strict-inductive protocol to enable reproducible, leakage-free evaluation.
The Lightning Network (LN) is a rapidly evolving payment channel network that enables scalable, off-chain transactions on top of Bitcoin. While prior research has documented its topological structure and liquidity concentration, the joint relationships between node lifetime, connectivity, and capacity remain insufficiently understood. This study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of these relationships using a large-scale dataset of LN topology snapshots spanning the period 2019-2023. We examine whether node lifetime influences shared channel capacity, and whether this effect is mediated and moderated by node degree. In addition, we account for hierarchical geographic structure and explore the role of country-level economic conditions. The results show that node lifetime has a positive but relatively modest direct effect on capacity. This relationship is largely mediated by node degree, indicating that liquidity accumulation primarily occurs through increased connectivity. Furthermore, the interaction between lifetime and degree reveals significant heterogeneity, with stronger effects observed among highly connected and high-capacity nodes. Mixed-level models demonstrate superior explanatory power, highlighting the importance of country- and region-level variation. The inclusion of GDP per capita confirms that broader economic conditions significantly influence capacity distribution. Overall, the findings suggest that liquidity in the LN emerges from the interplay of temporal dynamics, network structure, and economic context. This study contributes to a more integrated understanding of payment channel networks and provides a foundation for future research on their evolution and efficiency.
This paper examines Web3 ecosystems not merely as markets for digital assets, but as networked social spaces where economic transactions give rise to enduring social ties, shared narratives, and collective identities. Leveraging large-scale data mining of fused on-chain blockchain transactions and off-chain social media activity, we analyze over one hundred NFT collections to uncover how different forms of participation structure community formation in decentralized environments. Using network analysis, we identify distinct ecosystem roles, such as long-term holders, active traders, and short-term speculators, and demonstrate how each produces markedly different network topologies, levels of cohesion, and pathways for influence. We complement this structural analysis with discourse analysis of social media engagement, revealing how narrative production, visibility, and sustained interaction persist even as transactional activity declines. Our findings show that communities centered on holding behavior evolve from transactional networks into socially embedded ecosystems characterized by dense ties, decentralized influence, and ongoing cultural participation, while trader- and speculator-dominated networks remain fragmented and transactional. By linking network structure with discursive dynamics, this study provides a sociotechnical framework for understanding how value, identity, and inequality are negotiated in Web3 spaces. The approach offers a scalable method for detecting patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and representational imbalance, advancing network-based research on digital communities beyond purely economic or technical accounts.
As cross-chain interoperability advances, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols enable illicit funds to be reorganized into uniform liquid assets that flow throughout the cryptocurrency market. Such operations can bypass monitoring targeted at individual blockchains and thereby weaken current regulatory frameworks. Motivated by these, we introduce UniDetect, a multi-chain cryptocurrency fraud account detection method based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we use domain knowledge to guide the LLM to generate general transaction summary texts applicable to heterogeneous blockchain accounts, which serve as evidence for fraud account detection. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage alternating training strategy to continuously and dynamically enhance the multimodal joint reasoning for detecting fraudulent accounts based on both the textual evidence and the transaction graph patterns. Experiments on multiple blockchains show that UniDetect outperforms existing methods 5.57% to 7.58% in Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS). For cross-chain zero-shot detection, UniDetect identifies over 94.58% of fraudulent accounts. It also generalizes well to non-blockchain data, delivering a 6.06% improvement in F1 over existing methods. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/msy0513/UniDetect.
On-chain lending has expanded across multiple distributed ledgers as DeFi becomes increasingly multi-chain. This environment introduces novel technical and financial mechanisms, particularly cross-blockchain communication and asset transfer protocols, yet cross-chain elements remain understudied in lending protocol risk management. To address this gap, we applied panel regression fixed effects and OLS models to empirically analyze cross-blockchain interoperability solutions, using TVL and total revenue as performance proxies from October 2022 to January 2025. Our data set covers 15 decentralized lending protocols and 53 cross-chain bridges across 9 EVM-compatible blockchains, categorized as Ethereum, alternative layer-1s, and Ethereum layer-2 networks. Results reveal that cross-chain activity impacts on protocol performance. Bridge volume emerges as a critical driver, exerts a significant effect on TVL and revenue across different categories, though the direction of this effect varies heterogeneously. Increased bridge integrations are associated with decreased TVL and protocol revenue across categories, indicating liquidity escapes from those lending ecosystems. Liquidations produce heterogeneous effects across categories. New network launches do not have as significant relationships with TVL and revenue while bridge hacks show a significant and positive relationship. High R-squared values confirm meaningful explanatory power. We further show Ethereum attracts large depositors, while layer-2s skew toward retail participation. We conclude that effective DeFi risk models should incorporate cross-chain metrics and adopt a layer-aware approach to accurately reflect the evolving multi-chain landscape.
Saber Zerhoudi, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Felix Klement, Artur Romazanov · 12 authors
Moltbook is a social network where every participant is an AI agent. We analyze 1,312,238 posts, 6.7~million comments, and over 120,000 agent profiles across 5,400 communities, collected over 40 days (January 27 to March 9, 2026). We evaluate the platform through three layers. At the interaction layer, 91.4% of post authors never return to their own threads, 85.6% of conversations are flat (no reply ever receives a reply), the median time-to-first-comment is 55 seconds, and 97.3% of comments receive zero upvotes. Interaction reciprocity is 3.3%, compared to 22-60% on human platforms. An argumentation analysis finds that 64.6% of comment-to-post relations carry no argumentative connection. At the content layer, 97.9% of agents never post in a community matching their bio, 92.5% of communities contain every topic in roughly equal proportions, and over 80% of shared URLs point to the platform's own infrastructure. At the instruction layer, we use 41 Wayback Machine snapshots to identify six instruction changes during the observation window. Hard constraints (rate limit, content filters) produce immediate behavioral shifts. Soft guidance (``upvote good posts'', ``stay on topic'') is ignored until it becomes an explicit step in the executable checklist. The platform also poses technological risks. We document credential leaks (API keys, JWT tokens), 12,470 unique Ethereum addresses with 3,529 confirmed transaction histories, and attack discourse ranging from template-based SSH brute-forcing to multi-agent offensive security architectures. These persist unmoderated because the quality-filtering mechanisms are themselves non-functional. Moltbook is a socio-technical system where the technical layer responds to changes, but the social layer largely fails to emerge. The form of social media is reproduced in full. The function is absent.
Alexander Kropiunig, Svetlana Kremer, Bernhard Haslhofer
Crypto Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) shape Web3 narratives and retail investment behaviour. In volatile, high-risk markets, their credibility becomes a key determinant of their influence on followers. Yet prior research has focused on lifestyle influencers or generic financial commentary, leaving crypto KOLs' understandings of motivation, credibility, and responsibility underexplored. Drawing on interviews with 13 KOLs and self-determination theory (SDT), we examine how psychological needs are negotiated alongside monetisation and community expectations. Whereas prior work treats finfluencer credibility as a set of static credentials, our findings reveal it to be a self-determined, ethically enacted practice. We identify four community-recognised markers of credibility: self-regulation, bounded epistemic competence, accountability, and reflexive self-correction. This reframes credibility as socio-technical performance, extending SDT into high-risk crypto ecosystems. Methodologically, we employ a hybrid human-LLM thematic analysis. The study surfaces implications for designing credibility signals that prioritise transparency over hype.
National governments are increasingly adopting blockchain to enhance transparency, trust, and efficiency in public service delivery. However, evidence on how these technologies are governed across national contexts remains fragmented and overly focused on technical features. Using Polycentric Governance Theory, this study conducts a systematic review of peer-reviewed research published between 2021 and 2025 to examine blockchain-enabled public services and the institutional, organizational, and information-management factors shaping their adoption. Following PRISMA guidelines, we synthesize findings from major digital government and information systems databases to identify key application domains, including digital identity, electronic voting, procurement, and social services, and analyze the governance arrangements underpinning these initiatives. Our analysis reveals that blockchain adoption is embedded within polycentric environments characterized by distributed authority, inter-organizational coordination, and layered accountability. Rather than adopting full decentralization, governments typically utilize hybrid and permissioned designs that allow for selective decentralization alongside centralized oversight, a pattern we conceptualize as "controlled polycentricity." By reframing blockchain as a governance infrastructure that encodes rules for coordination and information-sharing, this study advances digital government theory beyond simple adoption metrics. The findings offer theoretically grounded insights for researchers and practical guidance for policymakers seeking to design and scale sustainable blockchain-enabled public services.
Daniel Commey, Matilda Nkoom, Yousef Alsenani, Sena G. Hounsinou · 5 authors
Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) face a fundamental tension between regulatory compliance and user privacy when detecting cross-institutional money laundering. Current approaches require either sharing sensitive transaction data or operating in isolation, leaving critical cross-chain laundering patterns undetected. We present FedGraph-VASP, a privacy-preserving federated graph learning framework that enables collaborative anti-money laundering (AML) without exposing raw user data. Our key contribution is a Boundary Embedding Exchange protocol that shares only compressed, non-invertible graph neural network representations of boundary accounts. These exchanges are secured using post-quantum cryptography, specifically the NIST-standardized Kyber-512 key encapsulation mechanism combined with AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption. Experiments on the Elliptic Bitcoin dataset with realistic Louvain partitioning show that FedGraph-VASP achieves an F1-score of 0.508, outperforming the state-of-the-art generative baseline FedSage+ (F1 = 0.453) by 12.1 percent on binary fraud detection. We further show robustness under low-connectivity settings where generative imputation degrades performance, while approaching centralized performance (F1 = 0.620) in high-connectivity regimes. We additionally evaluate generalization on an Ethereum fraud detection dataset, where FedGraph-VASP (F1 = 0.635) is less effective under sparse cross-silo connectivity, while FedSage+ excels (F1 = 0.855), outperforming even local training (F1 = 0.785). These results highlight a topology-dependent trade-off: embedding exchange benefits connected transaction graphs, whereas generative imputation can dominate in highly modular sparse graphs. A privacy audit shows embeddings are only partially invertible (R^2 = 0.32), limiting exact feature recovery.
Carbon credit systems have emerged as a policy tool to incentivize emission reductions and support the transition to clean energy. Reliable carbon-credit certification depends on mechanisms that connect actual, measured renewable-energy production to verifiable emission-reduction records. Although blockchain and IoT technologies have been applied to emission monitoring and trading, existing work offers limited support for certification processes, particularly for small and medium-scale renewable installations. This paper introduces a blockchain-based carbon-credit certification architecture, demonstrated through a 100 kWp photovoltaic case study, that integrates real-time IoT data collection, edge-level aggregation, and secure on-chain storage on a permissioned blockchain with smart contracts. Unlike approaches focused on trading mechanisms, the proposed system aligns with European legislation and voluntary carbon-market standards, clarifying the practical requirements and constraints that apply to photovoltaic operators. The resulting architecture provides a structured pathway for generating verifiable carbon-credit records and supporting third-party verification.
Myriam Nonaka, F. Javier Marín-Rodríguez, Alexander Jiricny, Miguel Romance · 7 authors
We construct the Bitcoin User Network (BUN) directly from raw blockchain data up to late 2025, which allows us to explore its mesoscopic properties and trace its temporal evolution. In particular, we analyze the structure of connected components and directed assortativity through the four variants of Newman's coefficient, implemented via custom algorithms and a dedicated database. Building on this, to characterize the distribution of structural influence, we introduce direction-sensitive centrality measures based on PageRank and HITS, which provide a complementary global analysis of the BUN and reveal a persistently unequal and increasingly core-periphery structure. In addition, we complement the structural analysis with a study of Bitcoin's price volatility using high-frequency market data. Overall, our results reveal a clear pattern of concentration within distribution: although the protocol is decentralized by design, the emergent user network evolves toward an asymmetric mesoscopic structure that indicates the existence of a few large-scale connected components that function as the critical backbone of the system.
Wenbin Wu, Kejiang Qian, Alexis Lui, Christopher Jack · 8 authors
We curate the DeXposure dataset, the first large-scale dataset for inter-protocol credit exposure in decentralized financial networks, covering global markets of 43.7 million entries across 4.3 thousand protocols, 602 blockchains, and 24.3 thousand tokens, from 2020 to 2025. A new measure, value-linked credit exposure between protocols, is defined as the inferred financial dependency relationships derived from changes in Total Value Locked (TVL). We develop a token-to-protocol model using DefiLlama metadata to infer inter-protocol credit exposure from the token's stock dynamics, as reported by the protocols. Based on the curated dataset, we develop three benchmarks for machine learning research with financial applications: (1) graph clustering for global network measurement, tracking the structural evolution of credit exposure networks, (2) vector autoregression for sector-level credit exposure dynamics during major shocks (Terra and FTX), and (3) temporal graph neural networks for dynamic link prediction on temporal graphs. From the analysis, we observe (1) a rapid growth of network volume, (2) a trend of concentration to key protocols, (3) a decline of network density (the ratio of actual connections to possible connections), and (4) distinct shock propagation across sectors, such as lending platforms, trading exchanges, and asset management protocols. The DeXposure dataset and code have been released publicly. We envision they will help with research and practice in machine learning as well as financial risk monitoring, policy analysis, DeFi market modeling, amongst others. The dataset also contributes to machine learning research by offering benchmarks for graph clustering, vector autoregression, and temporal graph analysis.
Andrea Venturi, Imanol Jerico-Yoldi, Francesco Zola, Raul Orduna
As Law Enforcement Agencies advance in cryptocurrency forensics, criminal actors aiming to conceal illicit fund movements increasingly turn to "mixin" services or privacy-based cryptocurrencies. Monero stands out as a leading choice due to its strong privacy preserving and untraceability properties, making conventional blockchain analysis ineffective. Understanding the behavior and operational patterns of criminal actors within Monero is therefore challenging and it is essential to support future investigative strategies and disrupt illicit activities. In this work, we propose a case study in which we leverage a novel graph-based methodology to extract structural and temporal patterns from Monero transactions linked to already discovered criminal activities. By building Address-Ring-Transaction graphs from flagged transactions, we extract structural and temporal features and use them to train Machine Learning models capable of detecting similar behavioral patterns that could highlight criminal modus operandi. This represents a first partial step toward developing analytical tools that support investigative efforts in privacy-preserving blockchain ecosystems
Reddit is in the minority of mainstream social platforms that permit posting content that may be considered to be at the edge of what is permissible, including so-called Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content. However, NSFW is becoming more common on mainstream platforms, with X now allowing such material. We examine the top 15 NSFW-restricted subreddits by size to explore the complexities of responsibly sharing adult content, aiming to balance ethical and legal considerations with monetization opportunities. We find that users often use NSFW subreddits as a social springboard, redirecting readers to private or specialized adult social platforms such as Telegram, Kik or OnlyFans for further interactions. They also directly negotiate image "trades" through credit cards or payment platforms such as PayPal, Bitcoin or Venmo. Disturbingly, we also find linguistic cues linked to non-consensual content sharing. To help platforms moderate such behavior, we trained a RoBERTa-based classification model, which outperforms GPT-4 and traditional classifiers such as logistic regression and random forest in identifying non-consensual content sharing, showing better performance in this specific task. The source code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/socsys/15NSFWsubreddits.