# Towards Understanding and Demystifying Bitcoin Mixing Services

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.16274 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16274/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Network Analytics for Anti-Money Laundering -- A Systematic Literature Review and Experimental Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19383/) (2024)
- [A Versatile Framework for Attributed Network Clustering via K-Nearest Neighbor Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05459/) (2024)
- [Effective Illicit Account Detection on Large Cryptocurrency MultiGraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02460/) (2023)
- [GARG-AML against Smurfing: A Scalable and Interpretable Graph-Based Framework for Anti-Money Laundering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04292/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One reason for the popularity of Bitcoin is due to its anonymity. Although several heuristics have been used to break the anonymity, new approaches are proposed to enhance its anonymity at the same time. One of them is the mixing service. Unfortunately, mixing services have been abused to facilitate criminal activities, e.g., money laundering. As such, there is an urgent need to systematically understand Bitcoin mixing services. In this paper, we take the first step to understand state-of-the-art Bitcoin mixing services. Specifically, we propose a generic abstraction model for mixing services and observe that there are two mixing mechanisms in the wild, i.e. swapping and obfuscating. Based on this model, we conduct a transaction-based analysis and successfully reveal the mixing mechanisms of four representative services. Besides, we propose a method to identify mixing transactions that leverage the obfuscating mechanism. The proposed approach is able to identify over 92% of the mixing transactions. Based on identified transactions, we then estimate the profit of mixing services and provide a case study of tracing the money flow of stolen Bitcoins.