# Investigating Similarities Across Decentralized Financial (DeFi) Services

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02591/) (2019)
- [SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08778/) (2021)
- [SoK: Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) with Automated Market Maker (AMM) Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12732/) (2021)
- [TTAGN: Temporal Transaction Aggregation Graph Network for Ethereum Phishing Scams Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13442/) (2022)
- [A Classification Framework for Stablecoin Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10098/) (2019)
- [Detecting Anomalous Cryptocurrency Transactions: an AML/CFT Application of Machine Learning-based Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04803/) (2022)
- [From banks to DeFi: the evolution of the lending market](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00970/) (2021)
- [Formal Analysis of Composable DeFi Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00540/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11933/) (2021)
- [Liquidity Risks in Lending Protocols: Evidence from Aave Protocol](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11973/) (2022)
- [Short Squeeze in DeFi Lending Market: Decentralization in Jeopardy?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04068/) (2023)
- [Leverage Staking with Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs): Opportunities and Risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08610/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ETH-TraceBench: A Large-Scale Event-Stream Benchmark for Ethereum DeFi under Temporal, Protocol, and Contract Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore the adoption of graph representation learning (GRL) algorithms to investigate similarities across services offered by Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Following existing literature, we use Ethereum transaction data to identify the DeFi building blocks. These are sets of protocol-specific smart contracts that are utilized in combination within single transactions and encapsulate the logic to conduct specific financial services such as swapping or lending cryptoassets. We propose a method to categorize these blocks into clusters based on their smart contract attributes and the graph structure of their smart contract calls. We employ GRL to create embedding vectors from building blocks and agglomerative models for clustering them. To evaluate whether they are effectively grouped in clusters of similar functionalities, we associate them with eight financial functionality categories and use this information as the target label. We find that in the best-case scenario purity reaches .888. We use additional information to associate the building blocks with protocol-specific target labels, obtaining comparable purity (.864) but higher V-Measure (.571); we discuss plausible explanations for this difference. In summary, this method helps categorize existing financial products offered by DeFi protocols, and can effectively automatize the detection of similar DeFi services, especially within protocols.