Time-aware Metapath Feature Augmentation for Ponzi Detection in Ethereum

With the development of Web 3.0 which emphasizes decentralization, blockchain technology ushers in its revolution and also brings numerous challenges, particularly in the field of cryptocurrency. Recently, a large number of criminal behaviors continuously emerge on blockchain, such as Ponzi schemes and phishing scams, which severely endanger decentralized finance. Existing graph-based abnormal behavior detection methods on blockchain usually focus on constructing homogeneous transaction graphs without distinguishing the heterogeneity of nodes and edges, resulting in partial loss of transaction pattern information. Although existing heterogeneous modeling methods can depict richer information through metapaths, the extracted metapaths generally neglect temporal dependencies between entities and do not reflect real behavior. In this paper, we introduce Time-aware Metapath Feature Augmentation (TMFAug) as a plug-and-play module to capture the real metapath-based transaction patterns during Ponzi scheme detection on Ethereum. The proposed module can be adaptively combined with existing graph-based Ponzi detection methods. Extensive experimental results show that our TMFAug can help existing Ponzi detection methods achieve significant performance improvements on the Ethereum dataset, indicating the effectiveness of heterogeneous temporal information for Ponzi scheme detection.