Ethereum just hit a 2.9 million tx record, but on-chain data shows that cheap address poisoning spam, rather than actual demand, is driving much of the post-Fusaka activity.
summary
- Ethereum processed approximately 2.9 million transactions every day. Ethereum Despite network activity hitting an all-time high, prices barely reacted.
- Andrey Sergeenkov’s research links this spike to large-scale address poisoning, where dusty stablecoin transfers inflate metrics for new addresses and sends.
- Lower fees post-fusaka will make spam and poisoning campaigns cheaper, reducing the number of transactions as a proxy for Ethereum’s true demand
According to on-chain data, Ethereum processed approximately 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, an all-time high for any blockchain network. However, the record activity has not been reflected in a corresponding price increase for Ether, raising questions about the nature of the trading surge.
Ethereum transactions are rapidly increasing
Average transaction fees during the period remained near recent lows, while validator exit queues decreased to zero. Despite these indicators, Ether price showed limited movement compared to broader market trends.
On-chain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov attributes the increase in activity to a large-scale address poisoning campaign. According to Sergeenkov’s analysis, such attacks involve malicious attackers mass-transferring wallets with small stablecoin transfers, creating fake addresses and inflating the number of transactions.
In address poisoning attacks, fraudsters generate wallet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones and send minimal or near-zero stablecoin transfers to potential victims. These transactions insert fake addresses into users’ transaction history. Typically, wallets only display the shortened prefix and suffix of the address, creating an opportunity for users to accidentally copy the fraudulent address and transfer funds to the attacker.
According to Sergeenkov’s research, about 80% of the abnormal growth in new addresses is due to stablecoins. Analysis of first-time stablecoin interactions revealed that approximately 67% of newly active addresses received a very small amount as their first transfer. This is a pattern consistent with automatic distribution rather than natural user adoption.
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The analysis found that about 3.86 million of the 5.78 million addresses in the sample received what Sergienkov described as “poison dust” as their first stablecoin transaction.
Sergenkov tracked small stablecoin transfers and identified senders who distributed Dust to at least 10,000 unique addresses. According to the study, the largest source of funding was smart contracts that sent minimal amounts of stablecoins to hundreds of thousands of wallets through features designed to fund large batches of poisoned addresses in a single transaction.
Sergenkov said the reduction in transaction fees since early December following Fusaka’s upgrade has made it economically viable to distribute millions of low-value transfers. Lower costs have turned what was once an infrequent scam into a more viable strategy for attackers.
The findings suggest that while lower fees and smoother throughput may represent technical improvements for the Ethereum network, they also lower cost barriers to spam activities. Our analysis shows that if a significant portion of recent on-chain activity consists of microtransactions, the increase in the number of transactions may limit insight into the actual demand for block space, decentralized applications, or the blockchain network itself.
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