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arXiv · 2609.27807

MixGuard: Towards Detecting and Understanding Mixer Laundering on Ethereum

Qishuang Fu·Hang Zheng·Xihan Xiong·Joseph K. Liu·Yixin Liu·Shirui Pan·Qin Wang·Weiqing Wang·Zhipeng Wang·Tsz Hon Yuen
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Abstract

Mixers protect privacy by concealing deposit--withdrawal links, but are also abused to launder illicit funds. Existing anti-money laundering studies do not specifically target mixer laundering, while mixer research focuses on deanonymization rather than identifying laundering-related transactions. Public reports remain fragmented, leaving no public case-level dataset for systematic measurement and detection. To fill this void, this paper presents the first comprehensive study of mixer laundering on Ethereum. We first construct \textsc{MixLaunder}, the first public case-level dataset of mixer laundering. It covers 27 cases involving Tornado Cash and Railgun from 2020 to 2025 and labels 9,300 laundering-related transactions with case identities and observable upstream and downstream fund flows, including deposits totaling approximately \$1.1 billion. By comparing these transactions with background mixer usage, we identify five common strategies, showing that laundering evidence spans complementary behavioral and fund-flow contexts, while same-case activity is locally tight but weakly connected across bursts. Our analysis further reveals coverage gaps in mixer-side risk screening and representative deanonymization heuristics. Guided by these findings, we develop \textsc{MixGuard}, which combines tri-view representation learning with two-stage grouping for transaction-level detection and case-aware grouping. Under strict case-level holdout evaluation, \textsc{MixGuard} outperforms representative baselines, achieving 97.89\% detection precision and 98.73\% group purity, while its top ten groups cover 95.09\% of each case's transactions on average.

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Qishuang Fu, Hang Zheng, Xihan Xiong, Joseph K. Liu, Yixin Liu, Shirui Pan, Qin Wang, Weiqing Wang, Zhipeng Wang, Tsz Hon Yuen. 2026-09-15. MixGuard: Towards Detecting and Understanding Mixer Laundering on Ethereum. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27807

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