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Abstract
We identify the slow liquidity drain (SLID) scam, an insidious and highly
profitable threat to decentralized finance (DeFi), posing a large-scale,
persistent, and growing risk to the ecosystem. Unlike traditional scams such as
rug pulls or honeypots (USENIX Sec'19, USENIX Sec'23), SLID gradually siphons
funds from liquidity pools over extended periods, making detection
significantly more challenging. In this paper, we conducted the first
large-scale empirical analysis of 319,166 liquidity pools across six major
decentralized exchanges (DEXs) since 2018. We identified 3,117 SLID affected
liquidity pools, resulting in cumulative losses of more than US$103 million. We
propose a rule-based heuristic and an enhanced machine learning model for early
detection. Our machine learning model achieves a detection speed 4.77 times
faster than the heuristic while maintaining 95% accuracy. Our study establishes
a foundation for protecting DeFi investors at an early stage and promoting
transparency in the DeFi ecosystem.