PEB Separation and State Migration: Unmasking the New Frontiers of DeFi AML Evasion
This exposes a critical flaw in industrial AML forensics for DeFi, showing that heuristic-based flow tracing has reached its limits and requires a paradigm shift.
The paper demonstrates that current anti-money laundering (AML) systems in DeFi, which rely on transaction-graph monitoring, fundamentally fail because they cannot capture economically meaningful value migration in composable smart-contract ecosystems. It proves through case studies that transfer-layer observation is neither attribution-complete nor causally closed due to mechanisms like PEB separation and state-mediated value migration.
Transfer-based anti-money laundering (AML) systems monitor token flows through transaction-graph abstractions, implicitly assuming that economically meaningful value migration is sufficiently encoded in transfer-layer connectivity. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption, the bedrock of current industrial forensics, fundamentally collapses in composable smart-contract ecosystems. We formalize two structural mechanisms that undermine the completeness of transfer-layer attribution. First, we introduce Principal-Execution-Beneficiary (PEB) separation, where intent originators, transaction executors (e.g., MEV searchers), and ultimate beneficiaries are functionally decoupled. Second, we formalize state-mediated value migration, where economic coupling is enforced through invariant-driven contract state transitions (e.g., AMM reserve rebalancing) rather than explicit transfer continuity. Through a real-world case study of role-separated limit order execution and a constructive cross-pool arbitrage model, we prove that these mechanisms render transfer-layer observation neither attribution-complete nor causally closed. We further argue that simply expanding transfer-layer tracing capabilities fails to resolve the underlying attribution ambiguity inherent in structurally decoupled execution. Under modular composition and open participation markets, these mechanisms are structurally generative, implying that heuristic-based flow tracing has reached a formal observational boundary. We advocate for a paradigm shift toward AML based on execution semantics, focusing on the restitution of economic causality from atomic execution logic and state invariants rather than static graph connectivity.