Building safer Bitcoin transactions

Who we are

We are graduate students developing BitGuard as part of our capstone project. Our work is centered on applying data science, graph analysis, and machine learning to a real-world problem in cryptocurrency safety: helping people make better decisions before sending funds to a Bitcoin wallet.

Why we built BitGuard

Cryptocurrency fraud continues to create major financial harm, and Bitcoin transactions are generally irreversible once they are sent. Recovery is often difficult or impossible. At the same time, many malicious wallets can operate for long periods before they are clearly identified, which means users may send funds without realizing the risk.

Existing approaches often depend on static blacklists of already-known bad wallets. That creates an obvious limitation: a blacklist can only flag wallets that have already been caught. Many current tools are also either expensive, enterprise-focused, or too manual for ordinary users to rely on in the moment they need to make a transaction decision.

Our goal

The goal of BitGuard is to provide a more accessible way to assess Bitcoin wallet risk using graph-based behavioral analysis and structured signals. Instead of only relying on whether a wallet appears on a blacklist, BitGuard is intended to help users evaluate whether a wallet shows patterns that may be associated with risky or malicious behavior.

In other words, we want to make wallet safety checks faster, clearer, and easier to use before a transaction happens, not after funds are already gone.

Who BitGuard is for

BitGuard is designed for a few different audiences. One important audience is everyday or less technical users who may not regularly work with Bitcoin, but still want a quick way to check whether a wallet looks safe before sending money. This includes people copying wallet addresses from websites, messages, or other unfamiliar sources.

It is also intended for organizations such as wallets, exchanges, compliance teams, and other platforms that may benefit from a lightweight risk-scoring tool without needing to adopt a full enterprise blockchain forensics suite.

What BitGuard aims to change

There is currently no simple, easy-to-use tool for the average user to understand who or what they are actually sending Bitcoin to. BitGuard is our attempt to close that gap by turning complex blockchain risk signals into something more practical, interpretable, and useful at the point of transaction.