TAS-GNN: A Status-Aware Signed Graph Neural Network for Anomaly Detection in Bitcoin Trust Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xue, Chang, Liu, Fang, Wang, Jiaye, Xing, Jinming, Yang, Chen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Xue, Chang
Liu, Fang
Wang, Jiaye
Xing, Jinming
Yang, Chen
author_facet Xue, Chang
Liu, Fang
Wang, Jiaye
Xing, Jinming
Yang, Chen
contents Decentralized financial platforms rely heavily on Web of Trust reputation systems to mitigate counterparty risk in the absence of centralized identity verification. However, these pseudonymous networks are inherently vulnerable to adversarial behaviors, such as Sybil attacks and camouflaged fraud, where malicious actors cultivate artificial reputations before executing exit scams. Traditional anomaly detection in this domain faces two critical limitations. First, reliance on naive statistical heuristics (e.g., flagging the lowest 5% of rated users) fails to distinguish between victims of bad-mouthing attacks and actual fraudsters. Second, standard Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) operate on the assumption of homophily and cannot effectively process the semantic inversion inherent in signed (trust vs. distrust) and directed (status) edges. We propose TAS-GNN (Topology-Aware Signed Graph Neural Network), a novel framework designed for feature-sparse signed networks like Bitcoin-Alpha. TAS-GNN integrates recursive Web-of-Trust labeling and a dual-channel message-passing architecture that separately models trust and distrust signals, fused through a Status-Aware Attention mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that TAS-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing signed GNN baselines.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13290
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TAS-GNN: A Status-Aware Signed Graph Neural Network for Anomaly Detection in Bitcoin Trust Systems
Xue, Chang
Liu, Fang
Wang, Jiaye
Xing, Jinming
Yang, Chen
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Decentralized financial platforms rely heavily on Web of Trust reputation systems to mitigate counterparty risk in the absence of centralized identity verification. However, these pseudonymous networks are inherently vulnerable to adversarial behaviors, such as Sybil attacks and camouflaged fraud, where malicious actors cultivate artificial reputations before executing exit scams. Traditional anomaly detection in this domain faces two critical limitations. First, reliance on naive statistical heuristics (e.g., flagging the lowest 5% of rated users) fails to distinguish between victims of bad-mouthing attacks and actual fraudsters. Second, standard Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) operate on the assumption of homophily and cannot effectively process the semantic inversion inherent in signed (trust vs. distrust) and directed (status) edges. We propose TAS-GNN (Topology-Aware Signed Graph Neural Network), a novel framework designed for feature-sparse signed networks like Bitcoin-Alpha. TAS-GNN integrates recursive Web-of-Trust labeling and a dual-channel message-passing architecture that separately models trust and distrust signals, fused through a Status-Aware Attention mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that TAS-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing signed GNN baselines.
title TAS-GNN: A Status-Aware Signed Graph Neural Network for Anomaly Detection in Bitcoin Trust Systems
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13290