Memecoins, emerging from internet culture and community-driven narratives, have rapidly evolved into a unique class of crypto assets. Unlike technology-driven cryptocurrencies, their market dynamics are primarily shaped by viral social media diffusion, celebrity influence, and speculative capital inflows. To capture the distinctive vulnerabilities of these ecosystems, we present the first Memecoin Ecosystem Fragility Framework (ME2F). ME2F formalizes memecoin risks in three dimensions: i) Volatility Dynamics Score capturing persistent and extreme price swings together with spillover from base chains; ii) Whale Dominance Score quantifying ownership concentration among top holders; and iii) Sentiment Amplification Score measuring the impact of attention-driven shocks on market stability. We apply ME2F to representative tokens (over 65% market share) and show that fragility is not evenly distributed across the ecosystem. Politically themed tokens such as TRUMP, MELANIA, and LIBRA concentrate the highest risks, combining volatility, ownership concentration, and sensitivity to sentiment shocks. Established memecoins such as DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE fall into an intermediate range. Benchmark tokens ETH and SOL remain consistently resilient due to deeper liquidity and institutional participation. Our findings provide the first ecosystem-level evidence of memecoin fragility and highlight governance implications for enhancing market resilience in the Web3 era.

Graph querying is the process of retrieving information from graph data using specialized languages (e.g., Cypher), often requiring programming expertise. Visual Graph Querying (VGQ) streamlines this process by enabling users to construct and execute queries via an interactive interface without resorting to complex coding. However, current VGQ tools only allow users to construct simple and specific query graphs, limiting users' ability to interactively express their query intent, especially for underspecified query intent. To address these limitations, we propose Envisage, an interactive visual graph querying system to enhance the expressiveness of VGQ in complex query scenarios by supporting intuitive graph structure construction and flexible parameterized rule specification. Specifically, Envisage comprises four stages: Query Expression allows users to interactively construct graph queries through intuitive operations; Query Verification enables the validation of constructed queries via rule verification and query instantiation; Progressive Query Execution can progressively execute queries to ensure meaningful querying results; and Result Analysis facilitates result exploration and interpretation. To evaluate Envisage, we conducted two case studies and in-depth user interviews with 14 graph analysts, The results demonstrate its effectiveness and usability in constructing, verifying, and executina complex araoh aueries.

Cryptocurrency money laundering poses a serious threat to the security and compliance of decentralized financial systems. While various detection methods have been proposed, existing approaches either lack explainability or struggle to effectively handle privacy coins. This dissertation proposes two research directions aimed at enhancing the explainability and effectiveness of anti-money laundering (AML) techniques. The first direction proposes an explainable AML framework for non-privacy coins by incorporating transaction semantic parsing and large language model-based classification. The second direction explores a novel method for tracking illicit fund flows involving privacy coins such as Monero, focusing on improving de-anonymization accuracy and identifying cross-chain laundering paths. Preliminary results on the first direction demonstrate the feasibility of a semantic-aware module and the potential of a fine-tuned large language model in detecting complex laundering behaviors.

As one of the most popular blockchain platforms supporting smart contracts, Ethereum has caught the interest of both investors and criminals. Differently from traditional financial scenarios, executing Know Your Customer verification on Ethereum is rather difficult due to its pseudonymous nature. Fortunately, as the transaction records stored in the Ethereum blockchain are publicly accessible, we can understand the behavior of accounts or detect illicit activities via transaction mining. Existing risk control techniques have primarily been developed from the perspectives of de-anonymizing address clustering and illicit account classification. However, these techniques cannot ascertain the potential risks for all accounts and are limited by specific heuristic strategies or insufficient label information. These constraints motivate us to seek an effective rating method for quantifying the spread of risk in a transaction network. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address the problem of account risk rating on Ethereum by proposing a novel model calledRiskProp, which includes a de-anonymous score to measure transaction anonymity and a network propagation mechanism to formulate the relationships between accounts and transactions. Experimental results on a realistic Ethereum dataset demonstrate that proposedRiskPropnewly discovered 63% of the Top 150 high-risk accounts as suspicious. The superior performance of risk score-based account classification experiments further verifies the effectiveness of our rating method (85.63% accuracy).

In recent years, money laundering crimes on blockchain, especially on Ethereum, have become increasingly rampant, resulting in substantial losses. The unique features of money laundering on Ethereum, such as decentralization and pseudonymity, pose new challenges for Ethereum anti-money laundering. Specifically, the existence of dense and extensive laundering gangs and intricate multilayered laundering pathways makes it exceptionally challenging for regulators to identify suspicious accounts and trace money flows. To address this issue, we propose an innovative DenseFlow framework that effectively identifies and traces money laundering activities by finding dense subgraphs and applying the maximum flow idea. We conduct multiple experiments on four datasets from Ethereum to validate the effectiveness of our approach. The precision of our DenseFlow is 16.34% higher than the start-of-the-art comparison methods on average, highlighting its distinctive contribution to tackling money laundering issues on blockchain.

As the largest blockchain platform that supports smart contracts, Ethereum has attracted wide attention from both academia and industry in recent years. Along with the prosperous development of Ethereum, the high-risk illegal practices on it are becoming more and more rampant, seriously jeopardizing the system’s trading security and long-term development. Therefore, the detection and quantification of account risk are of great importance for both cryptocurrency investors and blockchain security researchers. In this article, we propose the first general framework for account risk rating on Ethereum, which includes a devisable suspiciousness metric to adapt to various illicit fraud detection and a network propagation mechanism to formulate the relations between accounts and transactions. By conducting extensive experiments on a real-world dataset from Ethereum, we show the universality of the account risk rating framework. Particularly, statistical analyses on different risk levels of accounts demonstrate that the risk rating framework has access to detect various illicit accounts. And the metric analysis of risk rating results put forward some insights. Moreover, visualization of a suspicious transaction chain reveals the process of illicit activities on Ethereum, enabling investors to obtain an understanding of the risky accounts and avoid significant financial losses.

With the overall momentum of the blockchain industry, financial crimes related to blockchain crypto-assets are becoming increasingly prevalent. After committing a crime, the main goal of cybercriminals is to obfuscate the source of the illicit funds in order to convert them into cash and get away with it. Many studies have analyzed money laundering (ML) in the field of the traditional financial sector. However, in terms of the emerging blockchain crypto-asset ecosystem, there is currently only one public anti-money laundering (AML) dataset for Bitcoin– the Elliptic dataset, whose binary labels (licit vs. illicit transactions) cannot cover the ML behaviors in the evergrowing crypto-asset market. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a framework named XBlockFlow which identifies ML addresses starting from Ethereum heist incidents and obtains the first detailed Ethereum ML dataset named$\textit {EthereumHeist}$, and then conducts a comprehensive feature and evolution analysis on the$\textit {EthereumHeist}$dataset according to the three main phases of ML. We first search for the source cybercriminal accounts including exchange hackers, DeFi exploiters, and scammers. Then, employing the idea of taint analysis, we track the diverse downstream transactions and addresses layer by layer. At the end of tracking, we identify and categorize service providers, and go a step further to investigate advanced ML methods that do not exist in the Bitcoin scenario, e.g. token swap and counterfeit token creation. Based on the ML identification results, we obtain many interesting findings about crypto-asset money laundering, observing the escalating money laundering methods such as creating counterfeit tokens and masquerading as speculators.

With the continuous evolution of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency platforms such as Ethereum have emerged as centers for digital asset transactions and smart contracts deployment. However, this nascent financial ecosystem also introduces potential money laundering risks. The traditional financial industry has accumulated significant antimoney laundering (AML) experience and technical means for monitoring and detecting money laundering activities. Yet, the adaptability of these established AML algorithms in the context of blockchain remains unclear. This paper aims to investigate the practical adaptability of traditional AML algorithms on Ethereum data through empirical experiments. We gather eight real-world money laundering case datasets collected from Ethereum and conduct experiments using three traditional AML algorithms on these datasets. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms from various angles, including precision, recall, and the distribution of detected accounts' labels in comparison to the original datasets. It turns out algorithms demonstrate distinct performance in diverse money laundering cases, indicating that the adaptability of traditional AML algorithms on Ethereum data presents certain adaptability and limitations. Holoscope's accuracy demonstrates the value of dense subgraph properties in Ethereum money laundering detection, and further research can be conducted based on this model framework combined with the money laundering characteristics of Ethereum. Our study provides valuable insights for strengthening AML mechanisms on blockchain platforms and offers guidance for further research on detecting money laundering accounts in blockchain environments.

As the largest blockchain platform that supports smart contracts, Ethereum has developed with an incredible speed. Yet due to the anonymity of blockchain, the popularity of Ethereum has fostered the emergence of various illegal activities and money laundering by converting ill-gotten funds to cash. In the traditional money laundering scenario, researchers have uncovered the prevalent traits of money laundering. However, since money laundering on Ethereum is an emerging means, little is known about money laundering on Ethereum. To fill the gap, in this paper, we conduct an in-depth study on Ethereum money laundering networks through the lens of a representative security event on Upbit Exchange to explore whether money laundering on Ethereum has traditional traits. Specifically, we construct a money laundering network on Ethereum by crawling the transaction records of Upbit Hack. Then, we present five questions based on the traditional traits of money laundering networks. By leveraging network analysis, we characterize the money laundering network on Ethereum and answer these questions. In the end, we summarize the findings of money laundering networks on Ethereum, which lay the groundwork for money laundering detection on Ethereum.