Targeting the Achilles’ Heel: A GNN Framework for Dismantling Cryptocurrency War-Financing Networks

Cryptocurrencies are increasingly being exploited for international war-financing, enabling parties to fund activities or evade sanctions. This paper proposes a novel framework called DF4CWFN(Dismantling Framework for Cryptocurrency-based War-Financing Network) that leverages graph neural networks to analyze and dismantle cryptocurrency transaction networks associated with war-financing. The framework encodes local diffusion patterns and global spatial-temporal information to identify the most critical nodes underpinning these networks. Validated on real transaction data from the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine conflicts, the framework outperforms existing algorithms in pinpointing key nodes for dismantling the networks. Visualizations reveal how different entities like exchanges, payment processors, and fundraising addresses play crucial roles as financial hubs and obfuscation channels. The findings lay the groundwork for developing strategies to regulate, monitor, disrupt, or safeguard such financing networks, thereby promoting national financial stability and security in light of the increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies.