CryptoFlowBench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Reasoning on Blockchains for Cryptocurrency Fund Tracing

Abstract

Pseudonymous accounts and complex smart-contract ecosystems substantially hinder the tracing of illicit cryptocurrency fund flows. Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising performance in blockchain fraud detection, yet their static node- or edge-level predictions do not naturally generalize to multi-hop fund tracing. Meanwhile, existing tracing methods mainly rely on predefined heuristics to capture multi-hop relationships, limiting their adaptive reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce CryptoFlowBench, a benchmark constructed from authoritative reports on cryptocurrency-related illicit incidents, with four tasks spanning local to multi-hop fund tracing. These tasks pose substantial challenges to existing learning- and heuristic-based methods, particularly in complex multi-hop scenarios. We therefore propose ChainSleuth, a graph-tool-augmented agent that iteratively reasons, invokes graph tools, and updates its tracing trajectory, enabling adaptive information acquisition and recovery from erroneous paths. Experiments show that no baseline consistently dominates all four tasks, revealing substantial gaps between local fraud detection and multi-hop fund tracing. ChainSleuth achieves notable improvements on multi-hop tasks, demonstrating the potential of agentic graph reasoning for cryptocurrency fund investigation.