BitLINK: Temporal Linkage of Address Clusters in Bitcoin Blockchain

In the Bitcoin blockchain, an entity (e.g., a gambling service) may control multiple distinct address clusters. Links (i.e., trust relationships) between these disjoint address clusters can be established when one cluster is abandoned, and a new one is formed shortly thereafter. To link the clusters across time, we have developed a deep neural network model that exploits these synchronous actions derived from unlabeled data in a self-supervised manner. This model assesses whether two clusters exhibit synchronous temporal signatures indicative of a shared entity ownership. We validated our model on 26 real-world entities identified by WalletExplorer [36]. In addition to the existing knowledge, our analysis revealed more transaction history by linking address clusters for three major services: HelixMixer, Primedice, and Bitcoin Fog, as well as 60 other services. This enables us to address questions related to the revenue and expenditures of these services and create informative aggregate statistics. Readers can find code and data on our support website: http://www.bitlinkwallet.com.