Efficient and Reliable Service Detection on Bitcoin

The rise of cryptocurrencies has created new avenues for criminal money exchanges. Among various techniques, Bitcoin address clustering plays a crucial role in detecting and grouping addresses owned by the same entity.
This fundamental step is essential for deanonymizing addresses and analyzing the flow of funds in the blockchain. This advancement contributes to the battle against illicit commerce, money laundering, fraud, scams, and similar activities.
In this paper, we introduce two new heuristics, NSS and PEKET. NSS leverages Bitcoin non-standard scripts, while PEKET exploits the re-use of public keys to establish connections controlled by the same entity. Our contributions encompass (i) the detailed explanation of these two novel methods; (ii) the open-source publication of the tools we developed; and, (iii) the assessment of these heuristics using a proprietary extensive dataset of labeled addresses, which achieve precision levels of 1.0 and 0.979 respectively.