Enhancing fraud detection in the Ethereum blockchain using ensemble learning

The Ethereum blockchain operates as a decentralized platform, utilizing blockchain technology to distribute smart contracts across a global network. It enables currency and digital value exchange without centralized control. However, the exponential growth of online commerce has created a fertile ground for a surge in fraudulent activities such as money laundering and phishing, thereby exacerbating significant security vulnerabilities. To combat this, our article introduces an ensemble learning approach to accurately detect fraudulent Ethereum blockchain transactions. Our goal is to integrate a decision-making tool into the decentralized validation process of Ethereum, allowing blockchain miners to identify and flag fraudulent transactions. Additionally, our system can assist governmental organizations in overseeing the blockchain network and identifying fraudulent activities. Our framework incorporates various data pre-processing techniques and evaluates multiple machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, Isolation Forest, support vector machine, Random Forest, XGBoost, and recurrent neural network. These models are fine-tuned using grid search to enhance their performance. The proposed approach utilizes an ensemble of three distinct models (Random Forest, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and support vector machine) to further improve classification performance. It achieves high scores of over 98% across key classification metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Moreover, the approach is suitable for real-world usage, with an inference time of 0.13 s.