Adversarially Robust and Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Fraud Detection in Dynamic Blockchain Networks: A Systematic Solution-Based Literature Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62411/faith.3048-3719-428Keywords:
Adversarial Defence, Adversarial Robustness, Blockchain Fraud Detection, Dynamic Blockchain Networks, Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Graph Neural Networks, Temporal GNN, Trustworthy AIAbstract
Blockchain technology has revolutionized digital financial systems through decentralized, transparent, and secure transactions. However, the increasing sophistication of blockchain systems has coincided with the emergence of complex illicit activities, including ransomware transactions, Ponzi schemes, phishing, and money laundering. Traditional fraud-detection techniques may be inadequate for blockchain transaction networks because these networks are complex, dynamic, and highly interconnected. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach because of their ability to capture relationships within graph structures and their evolving behavioural patterns. This paper presents a systematic literature review of adversarially robust and explainable fraud-detection solutions based on GNNs for dynamic blockchain networks. The review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines and critically examined studies published between 2018 and 2026. The study provides an integrated synthesis of graph representation learning, dynamic graph learning, adversarial robustness, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), trustworthy AI, benchmark datasets, evaluation strategies, and regulatory compliance within the context of blockchain fraud detection. The review indicates that recent advances in Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks, GraphSAGE, Graph Transformers, and Temporal Graph Neural Networks have demonstrated promising improvements in fraud-detection performance across various experimental settings. However, challenges remain in achieving scalability, robustness against adversarial attacks, explainability, standardized evaluation, and real-time deployment. The review identifies major research gaps in blockchain fraud detection and examines the strengths, limitations, applicability, and maturity of existing techniques. Finally, based on the synthesized findings, a research roadmap is proposed for developing blockchain fraud-detection systems with improved explainability, scalability, robustness, and trustworthiness using GNNs. The findings provide actionable insights and recommendations for researchers and practitioners developing blockchain security solutions.
Downloads
References
N. Han, R. Zhang, X. Liu, and H. Zhang, “Illicit Bitcoin transaction detection via feature-gated temporal graph learning,” Sci. Rep., 2026, doi: 10.1038/s41598-026-53783-y.
Y. Elmougy and L. Liu, “Demystifying Fraudulent Transactions and Illicit Nodes in the Bitcoin Network for Financial Forensics,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2023, pp. 3979–3990. doi: 10.1145/3580305.3599803.
Weber, M., Domeniconi, G., Chen, J., Weidele, D. K. I., Bellei, C., Robinson, T., & Leiserson, C. E. (2019). Anti-money laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with graph convolutional networks for financial forensics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.02591. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.02591
S. Motie and B. Raahemi, “Financial fraud detection using graph neural networks: A systematic review,” Expert Syst. Appl., vol. 240, p. 122156, Apr. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122156.
F. Mujkanovic, S. Geisler, S. Günnemann, and A. Bojchevski, “Are Defenses for Graph Neural Networks Robust?,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022. doi: 10.52202/068431-0651.
F. Ares-Robledo, H. Rifà-Pous, and R. Clirisó, “Graph neural networks for anomaly detection: a systematic review of dynamic temporal approaches,” Artif. Intell. Rev., vol. 59, no. 5, 2026, doi: 10.1007/s10462-026-11532-7.
I. Alarab and S. Prakoonwit, “Graph-Based LSTM for Anti-money Laundering: Experimenting Temporal Graph Convolutional Network with Bitcoin Data,” Neural Process. Lett., vol. 55, no. 1, 2023, doi: 10.1007/s11063-022-10904-8.
R. Huang, “FinGuard-GNN: Dynamic Graph Neural Network Framework for Financial Fraud Detection,” Front. Business, Econ. Manag., vol. 19, no. 3, 2025, doi: 10.54097/wh6hg844.
A. Harper and M. D. Lee, “Scalable Blockchain Fraud Detection Using Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks,” Front. Appl. Phys. Math., vol. 2, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.71465/fapm141.
Enyan Dai, Tianxiang Zhao, Huaisheng Zhu, Junjie Xu, Zhimeng Guo, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang & Suhang Wang, “A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Privacy, Robustness, Fairness, and Explainability,” Mach. Intell. Res., 2024, doi: 10.1007/s11633-024-1510-8.
H. Farrukh, S. Zafar, Z. U. Rehman, A. A. Shah, and N. Alshammry, “Blockchain-Based Fraud Detection: A Comparative Systematic Literature Review of Federated Learning and Machine Learning Approaches,” Electronics, 2025, doi: 10.3390/electronics14244952.
Aldo Pareja, Giacomo Domeniconi, Jie Chen, Tengfei Ma, Toyotaro Suzumura, Hiroki Kanezashi, Tim Kaler, Tao B. Schardl, Charles E. Leiserson, “EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs.” 2019 doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1902.10191
Kulkarni, O., & Chandra, R. (2025). DynBERG: Dynamic BERT-based Graph neural network for financial fraud detection. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.00047.
V. Sivakumar, A. K. Verma, P. Kumar, N. Saw, and V. H. Krishnan, “Fraud Detection in Financial Transaction Using GNN,” in Proceedings of International Conference on Visual Analytics and Data Visualization (ICVADV 2025), 2025. doi: 10.1109/ICVADV63329.2025.10960835.
Gu, W., Sun, M., Liu, B., Xu, K., & Sui, M. (2024). Adaptive spatio-temporal aggregation for temporal dynamic graph-based fraud risk detection. Journal of Computer Technology and Software, 3(5), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13626101.
A. A. J. Al-Hchaimi, M. A. Khalifa, and W. El-Shafai, “Explainable AI With Imbalanced Learning Strategies for Blockchain Transaction Fraud Detection,” Eng. Reports, vol. 8, no. 1, 2026, doi: 10.1002/eng2.70545.
T. Zhang and H. Ye, “Fraud Detection Based on Graph Neural Network,” in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 2023. doi: 10.3233/FAIA230858.
Page, M. J., McKenzie, J. E., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T. C., Mulrow, C. D., Shamseer, L., Tetzlaff, J. M., Akl, E. A., Brennan, S. E., Chou, R., Glanville, J., Grimshaw, J. M., Hróbjartsson, A., Lalu, M. M., Li, T., Loder, E. W., Mayo-Wilson, E., McDonald, S., McGuinness, L. A., Stewart, L. A., Thomas, J., Tricco, A. C., Welch, V. A., Whiting, P., & Moher, D. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: An updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. Systematic Reviews, 10, 89. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-021-01626-4.
Prisma, “Transparent reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.” 2020.
Y. Zhang and others, “A Survey on Privacy in Graph Neural Networks: Attacks, Preservation, and Applications,” IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., vol. 36, no. 12, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2024.3454328.
B. Wu, K. M. Chao, and Y. Li, “Heterogeneous graph neural networks for fraud detection and explanation in supply chain finance,” Inf. Syst., vol. 121, p. 102335, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.is.2023.102335.
Y. Liu, Z. Sun, and W. Zhang, “Improving fraud detection via hierarchical attention-based Graph Neural Network,” J. Inf. Secur. Appl., vol. 72, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.jisa.2022.103399.
A. Huang, X. Zhang, Y. Wang, S. Tsai, P. Zhou, and L. Chen, “Dynamic Calibration of Decision Thresholds for Financial Anomaly Detection: Verification With Payment Platform Information and Data,” J. Glob. Inf. Manag., vol. 33, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.4018/JGIM.395852.
J. Xia, L. Wu, J. Chen, B. Hu, and S. Z. Li, “SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation,” in WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022, 2022. doi: 10.1145/3485447.3512156.
P. Li, Y. Xie, X. Xu, J. Zhou, and Q. Xuan, “Phishing Fraud Detection on Ethereum Using Graph Neural Network,” in Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2022. doi: 10.1007/978-981-19-8043-5_26.
J. Chen and Y. Yang, “Real-time dynamic graph learning with temporal attention for financial fraud detection,” Front. Artif. Intell., vol. 9, 2026, doi: 10.3389/frai.2026.1774013.
Y. Tian, G. Liu, J. Wang, and M. Zhou, “ASA-GNN: Adaptive Sampling and Aggregation-Based Graph Neural Network for Transaction Fraud Detection,” IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst., vol. 11, no. 3, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2023.3335485.
Y. Wang, Q. Zheng, X. Li, L. Wang, and L. Lin, “CoSemiGNN: Blockchain fraud detection with dynamic graph neural networks based on co-association of semi-supervised,” Expert Syst. Appl., vol. 298, p. 129853, 2026, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.129853.
M. U. Khan, M. T. Shahid, M. Ashraf, M. Riaz, U. Rahman, and A. Iqbal, “Financial Fraud Detection with AI: A Machine Learning-Based Approach for Securing Digital Transactions,” Glob. Res. J. Nat. Sci. Technol., 2025, doi: 10.53762/grjnst.03.03.09.
A. Singh and V. Pareek, “Blockchain for Cybersecurity: Strengthening Digital Defenses with Decentralization and Cryptography,” in Multimedia And Multimodal Intelligence For Sustainable Development, 2026. doi: 10.1201/9781003634522-6.
J. Gao, B. Ansu, Q. Xia, C. Akwaboah, I. A. Obiri, and G. M. Ntuala, “Enhanced Temporal Graph Networks for Fraud Detection in Transactional Blockchain Networks,” in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2025. doi: 10.1109/IJCNN64981.2025.11228825.
B. S. Richard, J. Gao, Q. Xia, K. Victor, E. B. Fabien, and M. M. Rossini, “EAGLE: Ensemble Adaptive Graph Learning for Enhanced Ethereum Fraud Detection,” in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2026. doi: 10.1007/978-981-95-3543-9_19.
Z. Sheng, L. Song, and Y. Wang, “Dynamic Feature Fusion: Combining Global Graph Structures and Local Semantics for Blockchain Phishing Detection,” IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag., vol. 22, no. 5, 2025, doi: 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3576130.
M. Chen, R. Liu, Q. Song, G. Song, C. Li, and Q. Zeng, “HSTA: Ethereum Phishing Fraud Detection Model Based on Dynamic Graph Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Attention Mechanism,” in Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2026. doi: 10.1007/978-981-95-4142-3_5.
Y. Cui, X. Han, J. Chen, X. Zhang, J. Yang, and X. Zhang, “FraudGNN-RL: A Graph Neural Network With Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Financial Fraud Detection,” IEEE Open J. Comput. Soc., vol. 6, pp. 426–437, 2025, doi: 10.1109/OJCS.2025.3543450.
Lin, Z., Luo, Q., Wu, D., Shen, J., Li, L., Nong, X., & Qin, Z. (2026). Detecting illicit transactions in bitcoin: A wavelet-temporal graph transformer approach for anti-money laundering. Scientific Reports, 16(1), 1548. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-23901-3.
A. Amores, G. M. Ramírez V, F. Gutiérrez, J. Díaz-Arancibia, and F. Moreira, “Navigating the Trust Landscape: Fraud Analysis of Ethereum Blockchain Networks Using A.I,” in Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 2026. doi: 10.1007/978-3-032-01234-0_32.
F. Johannessen and M. Jullum, “Finding Money Launderers Using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks.” 2023.
F. Wan and P. Li, “A Novel Money Laundering Prediction Model Based on a Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory,” Symmetry (Basel)., vol. 16, no. 3, 2024, doi: 10.3390/sym16030378.
E. Cengiz and M. Gök, “Anti Money Laundering in Bitcoin Network Using Chaotic Time Series and Graph Convolution Network,” J. Univers. Comput. Sci., vol. 31, no. 11, 2025, doi: 10.3897/jucs.135907.
C. Lou, Y. Wang, J. Li, Y. Qian, and X. Li, “Graph neural network for fraud detection via context encoding and adaptive aggregation,” Expert Syst. Appl., vol. 261, p. 125473, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2024.125473.
L. Hu, “GNN-Augmented RL for Fraud Detection in Decentralized Finance,” Appl. Comput. Eng., vol. 152, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.54254/2755-2721/2025.22856.
B. Deng, J. Chen, Y. Hu, C. Chen, and T. Zhang, “Mutual GNN-MLP distillation for robust graph adversarial defense,” Neural Networks, vol. 189, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2025.107513.
B. Khemani, S. Patil, K. Kotecha, and S. Tanwar, “A review of graph neural networks: concepts, architectures, techniques, challenges, datasets, applications, and future directions,” J. Big Data, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024, doi: 10.1186/s40537-023-00876-4.
J. Chen, M. Ma, H. Ma, and H. Zheng, “A Survey of Privacy Security for Graph Neural Networks,” J. Cyber Secur., vol. 10, no. 3, 2025, doi: 10.19363/J.cnki.cn10-1380/tn.2025.05.08.
Wu, T., Cui, C., Xian, X., Qiao, S., Wang, C., Yuan, L., & Yu, S. (2025). Understanding the robustness of graph neural networks against adversarial attacks. Knowledge-Based Systems, 323, 113714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2025.113714.
Q. Tao, J. Liao, E. Zhang, and L. Li, “A Dual Robust Graph Neural Network Against Graph Adversarial Attacks,” Neural Networks, vol. 175, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2024.106276.
L. Gosch, S. Geisler, D. Sturm, B. Charpentier, D. Zügner, and S. Günnemann, “Adversarial Training for Graph Neural Networks: Pitfalls, Solutions, and New Directions,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023. doi: 10.52202/075280-2532.
L. Shi and W. Liu, “A Closer Look at Curriculum Adversarial Training: From an Online Perspective,” in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024. doi: 10.1609/aaai.v38i13.29418.
H. A. Prasetya, X. Liu, T. Murata, and A. Matono, “A multi-rounded adversarial scenario for graph-based promo fraud detection,” Soc. Netw. Anal. Min., vol. 16, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.1007/s13278-025-01566-0.
Enyan Dai, Tianxiang Zhao, Huaisheng Zhu, Junjie Xu, Zhimeng Guo, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Suhang Wang. A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Privacy, Robustness, Fairness, and Explainability[J]. Machine Intelligence Research, 2024, 21(6): 1011-1061. DOI: 10.1007/s11633-024-1510-8.
M. Nandan, S. Mitra, and D. De, “GraphXAI: a survey of graph neural networks (GNNs) for explainable AI (XAI),” Neural Comput. Appl., 2025, doi: 10.1007/s00521-025-11054-3.
C. Agarwal, O. Queen, H. Lakkaraju, and M. Zitnik, “Evaluating explainability for graph neural networks,” Sci. Data, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, doi: 10.1038/s41597-023-01974-x.
F. Ertam, “Near Real-Time Ethereum Fraud Detection Using Explainable AI in Blockchain Networks,” Appl. Sci., vol. 15, no. 19, 2025, doi: 10.3390/app151910841.
M. Kamran, M. M. Rehan, W. Nisar, and M. W. Rehan, “ARCADE-Adversarially Robust Cost-Sensitive Anomaly Detection in Blockchain Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence,” Electronics, vol. 14, no. 8, 2025, doi: 10.3390/electronics14081648.
S. Ferretti, G. D’Angelo, and V. Ghini, “Enhancing Anti-Money Laundering Frameworks: An Application of Graph Neural Networks in Cryptocurrency Transaction Classification,” IEEE Access, vol. 13, 2025, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3552240.
M. Z. Haider, T. Noreen, and M. Salman, “Towards Quantum-Ready Blockchain Fraud Detection via Ensemble Graph Neural Networks,” in 2025 7th International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications (BCCA 2025), 2025. doi: 10.1109/BCCA66705.2025.11229725.
A. Asiri and K. Somasundaram, “Graph convolution network for fraud detection in bitcoin transactions,” Sci. Rep., vol. 15, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-95672-w.
M. Z. Haider, T. Noreen, and M. Salman, “Blockchain Fraud Detection Using Ensemble Graph Neural Networks,” J. Artif. Intell. Res., vol. 2, no. 2, 2025, doi: 10.70891/jair.2025.080018.
A. Laurent, “Graph Neural Networks for Blockchain Security: A Deep Learning Approach to Anomaly Detection,” Front. Interdiscip. Appl. Sci., vol. 2, no. 01, 2025, doi: 10.71465/fias.v2i01.18.
Q. Wang, Y. Shen, and H. Dong, “Hypergraph-based contrastive learning for enhanced fraud detection,” Front. Artif. Intell., vol. 8, 2025, doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1703135.
V. Kale and S. Chakraborty, “Graph Neural Networks for Financial Fraud Detection: A Detailed Literature Review,” Int. J. Sci. Res. Comput. Sci. Eng. Inf. Technol., vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 346–353, 2026, doi: 10.32628/CSEIT26121352.
G. M. Ntuala and others, “A dual-layer GNN with economic penalty mechanisms for blockchain fraud detection,” Expert Syst. Appl., vol. 299, p. 130121, 2026, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.130121.
W. Zhao, S. Alwidian, and Q. H. Mahmoud, “Adversarial Training Methods for Deep Learning: A Systematic Review,” Algorithms, 2022, doi: 10.3390/a15080283.
F. Guan, T. Zhu, W. Zhou, and K. K. R. Choo, “Graph neural networks: a survey on the links between privacy and security,” Artif. Intell. Rev., vol. 57, no. 2, 2024, doi: 10.1007/s10462-023-10656-4.
A. Sajeeda and B. M. M. Hossain, “Exploring generative adversarial networks and adversarial training,” Int. J. Cogn. Comput. Eng., 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.ijcce.2022.03.002.
Q. Z. Cai, C. Liu, and D. Song, “Curriculum adversarial training,” in IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018. doi: 10.24963/ijcai.2018/520.
A. Mohan, K. P.V, P. Sankar, K. M. Manohar, and A. Peter, “Improving anti-money laundering in bitcoin using evolving graph convolutions and deep neural decision forest,” Data Technol. Appl., vol. 57, no. 3, 2023, doi: 10.1108/DTA-06-2021-0167.
Xie, B., Chang, H., Zhang, Z., Wang, X., Wang, D., Zhang, Z., Ying, R., & Zhu, W. (2023). Adversarially robust neural architecture search for graph neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (pp. 8143–8152). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00787.
R. Weerawarna, S. J. Miah, and X. Shao, “Emerging advances of blockchain technology in finance: a content analysis,” Pers. Ubiquitous Comput., vol. 27, no. 4, 2023, doi: 10.1007/s00779-023-01712-5.
T. Adam and F. Babič, “Identifying Illicit Activities in Blockchain Transaction Graph Networks,” Electronics, vol. 14, no. 23, 2025, doi: 10.3390/electronics14234599.
A. Ancelotti and C. Liason, “Review of blockchain application with Graph Neural Networks, Graph Convolutional Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks.” 2024. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.4971275.
G. Tong and J. Shen, “Financial transaction fraud detector based on imbalance learning and graph neural network,” Appl. Soft Comput., vol. 149, p. 110984, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.asoc.2023.110984.
S. J. Buu and H. J. Kim, “Disentangled Prototypical Graph Convolutional Network for Phishing Scam Detection in Cryptocurrency Transactions,” Electronics, vol. 12, no. 21, 2023, doi: 10.3390/electronics12214390.
M. T. Le, O. Harris, C. Bennett, and F. Greene, “Behavior Path Analysis for Blockchain Fraud Detection Using Graph Neural Architectures,” Front. Appl. Phys. Math., vol. 2, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.71465/fapm229.
Amara, K., Ying, R., Zhang, Z., Han, Z., Shan, Y., Brandes, U., Schemm, S., & Zhang, C. (2022). GraphFramEx: Towards systematic evaluation of explainability methods for graph neural networks. arXiv, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.09677
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Oluwaseun Adeniyi Ojerinde, Ramatu Abubakar, Benjamin Ilunuamie Alenoghena, Kehinde Hussein Lawal

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


