# Slow is Fast! Dissecting Ethereum's Slow Liquidity Drain Scams

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02591/) (2019)
- [SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13035/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Demystifying Fraudulent Transactions and Illicit Nodes in the Bitcoin Network for Financial Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06108/) (2023)
- [The Anatomy of a Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10109/) (2018)
- [Token Spammers, Rug Pulls, and SniperBots: An Analysis of the Ecosystem of Tokens in Ethereum and in the Binance Smart Chain (BNB)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08202/) (2022)
- [The Art of The Scam: Demystifying Honeypots in Ethereum Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06976/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13508/) (2021)
- [DeFiTail: DeFi Protocol Inspection through Cross-Contract Execution Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11035/) (2024)
- [Tracing Transactions Across Cryptocurrency Ledgers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12786/) (2018)
- [SoK: Lending Pools in Decentralized Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13230/) (2020)
- [Evolve Path Tracer: Early Detection of Malicious Addresses in Cryptocurrency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05412/) (2023)
- [Decentralized Finance (DeFi): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05282/) (2023)
- [DeFi-ning DeFi: Challenges & Pathway](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05589/) (2021)
- [Measuring Arbitrage Losses and Profitability of AMM Liquidity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05803/) (2024)
- [Account Abstraction, Analysed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00448/) (2023)
- [Why Trick Me: The Honeypot Traps on Decentralized Exchanges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13501/) (2023)
- [CRPWarner: Warning the Risk of Contract-related Rug Pull in DeFi Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01425/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We identify the slow liquidity drain (SLID) scam, an insidious and highly profitable threat to decentralized finance (DeFi), posing a large-scale, persistent, and growing risk to the ecosystem. Unlike traditional scams such as rug pulls or honeypots (USENIX Sec'19, USENIX Sec'23), SLID gradually siphons funds from liquidity pools over extended periods, making detection significantly more challenging. In this paper, we conducted the first large-scale empirical analysis of 319,166 liquidity pools across six major decentralized exchanges (DEXs) since 2018. We identified 3,117 SLID affected liquidity pools, resulting in cumulative losses of more than US103 million. We propose a rule-based heuristic and an enhanced machine learning model for early detection. Our machine learning model achieves a detection speed 4.77 times faster than the heuristic while maintaining 95% accuracy. Our study establishes a foundation for protecting DeFi investors at an early stage and promoting transparency in the DeFi ecosystem.