Graph Neural Networks for Blockchain Security: A Deep Learning Approach to Anomaly Detection

Abstract

The rapid expansion of blockchain technology has led to increased security challenges, particularly in detecting fraudulent transactions and malicious activities within decentralized networks. Traditional anomaly detection techniques, including rule-based heuristics and supervised learning models, struggle to adapt to the dynamic and complex nature of blockchain transactions. This paper introduces a graph neural network (GNN)-based anomaly detection framework designed to improve blockchain security by leveraging the inherent graph structure of transaction networks.

The proposed approach models blockchain transactions as a directed graph, where nodes represent wallet addresses and edges correspond to transaction flows. By applying spatial and temporal graph learning techniques, the framework captures both network topology and transaction evolution over time, allowing for the identification of anomalous activities such as money laundering, phishing scams, and Ponzi schemes. The GNN model incorporates graph convolutional networks (GCN), graph attention networks (GAT), and gated recurrent units (GRU) to learn both spatial dependencies and sequential patterns within blockchain transactions.

Experiments conducted on Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction datasets demonstrate that the GNN-based framework outperforms conventional fraud detection methods in terms of precision, recall, and false positive reduction. The model successfully detects fraudulent transactions with an F1-score of 0.92, showing its effectiveness in identifying emerging threats in blockchain networks. These results highlight the potential of deep learning-based anomaly detection in enhancing blockchain security, providing a scalable and adaptive solution for detecting fraud in decentralized financial ecosystems.