On-Chain Behavioral Signatures for Classifying Centralized Exchange Addresses on Ethereum Using Proof-of-Reserves

Abstract

Centralized exchanges (CEXs) are key gateways between traditional finance and digital asset markets, yet identifying their blockchain addresses remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on opaque attribution labels or treat exchanges as secondary classification targets, leaving generalization to unseen exchanges insufficiently examined. This study develops a classification framework using Proof-of-Reserves (PoR) disclosures, with 3,033,857 Ethereum addresses from 15 CEXs and five Non-CEX categories. We derive 58 on-chain behavioral features and evaluate LightGBM against logistic regression (LR) under a leave-one-exchange-out protocol. Across five lookback windows (30-730 days), LightGBM consistently outperformed LR, with macro PR-AUC increasing from 0.6611 to 0.9594 using the selected 17 features, compared with 0.7697 for LR at 730 days. Robustness checks showed comparable performance when feature selection and hyperparameter optimization were repeated across splits and held-out exchanges, while exchange-balanced reweighting improved macro PR-AUC. SHAP analysis and feature-group ablation identified gas behavior, ERC-20 token activity, and internal transactions as key predictive signals in the constructed dataset. These findings support interpretable CEX address screening for blockchain monitoring, while the released feature dataset enables reproducible follow-up research.