Paper Information
- Author
- Yuchen Lei,Yuexin Xiang,Qin Wang,Rafael Dowsley,Tsz Hon Yuen,Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo,Jiangshan Yu
- Published
- 1-30-2025
- Updated
- 9-4-2025
- Affiliation
- School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University
- Country
- China
- Conference
- Computing Research Repository (CoRR)
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies are widely used, yet current methods for analyzing
transactions often rely on opaque, black-box models. While these models may
achieve high performance, their outputs are usually difficult to interpret and
adapt, making it challenging to capture nuanced behavioral patterns. Large
language models (LLMs) have the potential to address these gaps, but their
capabilities in this area remain largely unexplored, particularly in cybercrime
detection. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by applying LLMs to
real-world cryptocurrency transaction graphs, with a focus on Bitcoin, one of
the most studied and widely adopted blockchain networks. We introduce a
three-tiered framework to assess LLM capabilities: foundational metrics,
characteristic overview, and contextual interpretation. This includes a new,
human-readable graph representation format, LLM4TG, and a connectivity-enhanced
transaction graph sampling algorithm, CETraS. Together, they significantly
reduce token requirements, transforming the analysis of multiple moderately
large-scale transaction graphs with LLMs from nearly impossible to feasible
under strict token limits. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs have
outstanding performance on foundational metrics and characteristic overview,
where the accuracy of recognizing most basic information at the node level
exceeds 98.50% and the proportion of obtaining meaningful characteristics
reaches 95.00%. Regarding contextual interpretation, LLMs also demonstrate
strong performance in classification tasks, even with very limited labeled
data, where top-3 accuracy reaches 72.43% with explanations. While the
explanations are not always fully accurate, they highlight the strong potential
of LLMs in this domain. At the same time, several limitations persist, which we
discuss along with directions for future research.