Content area

Abstract

In recent years, blockchain technology has gained widespread attention for its immutable and distributed ledger mechanism that ensures security and transparency among all participants. However, the decentralized nature of the blockchain network consequently presents its unique challenges in detecting fraudulent activities that may be executed by malicious actors. The traditional detection methods, such as rule-based systems, may not be sufficient to capture the complex and evolving nature of these activities. This paper explores the application of machine learning and transaction graph representation to detect suspicious accounts on the World Asset Exchange (WAX) blockchain. By leveraging dynamic subgraph embedding generation and contrastive representation learning, the proposed approach primarily targets the identification of suspicious transaction behaviors indicative of fraudulent activity. The contrastive representation learning approach enhances the generation of subgraph embeddings through a contrastive loss function to effectively discriminate between potentially fraudulent and legitimate transaction behavior by optimizing the distances in the embedding space. This process significantly enhances the classification accuracy, particularly for the imbalanced minority class often seen in fraud detection scenarios. The results of the experimental validations indicate the presence of potentially fraudulent activities and highlight the effectiveness of the anomaly ranking mechanism in identifying new, previously unseen cases.

Details

1009240
Title
Identifying Illicit Activities in Blockchain Transaction Graph Networks
Author
Publication title
Volume
14
Issue
23
First page
4599
Number of pages
27
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
Place of publication
Basel
Country of publication
Switzerland
Publication subject
e-ISSN
20799292
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2025-11-24
Milestone dates
2025-10-08 (Received); 2025-11-18 (Accepted)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
24 Nov 2025
ProQuest document ID
3280947594
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/identifying-illicit-activities-blockchain/docview/3280947594/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-12-10
Database
2 databases
  • Coronavirus Research Database
  • ProQuest One Academic