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Ethereum is posting record onchain activity, but ETH’s muted price action suggests the surge may not reflect real user demand.
The network processed nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, an all-time high, even as average fees stayed near recent lows and validator exit queues dropped to zero. In past cycles, that combination would have fed a familiar narrative of rising demand, tighter blockspace, and mounting pressure on ETH supply. This time, price action is telling a different story. Ether was trading around $3,180 on Monday, down roughly 0.7% on the day and still lagging the broader momentum of the CoinDesk 20 index.
According to onchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov, the surge in activity might be from a large-scale address poisoning campaign, where scammers flood wallets with tiny stablecoin “dust” transfers to plant lookalike addresses into transaction histories, inflating transaction counts without reflecting genuine user demand.
In address poisoning attacks, scammers generate wallet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones and then send small, often sub-$1 stablecoin transfers to potential victims.
Those dust transactions insert the fake addresses into a user’s transaction history, where wallets typically display only shortened prefixes and suffixes.
When users later copy an address from that history without verifying every character, they can mistakenly send real funds to the attacker’s lookalike address, turning what appears to be routine activity into a costly error.
Stablecoin ties
Sergeenkov’s analysis shows the recent jump in Ethereum activity is closely tied to stablecoins, which account for roughly 80% of the unusual growth in new addresses.
Looking at first-time stablecoin interactions, he found that about 67% of newly active addresses received less than $1 as their initial transfer, a pattern consistent with automated dusting rather than organic onboarding. In total, roughly 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses in the sample received what he classifies as poisoning dust as their first stablecoin transaction.
To identify the source of that activity, Sergeenkov tracked USDT and USDC transfers under $1 and isolated senders that distributed dust to at least 10,000 unique addresses. The largest of those were smart contracts that sent tiny amounts of stablecoins to hundreds of thousands of wallets, financed by a function designed to fund large batches of poisoning addresses in a single transaction.
Those addresses then fanned out across the network, inflating transaction counts and new address creation while creating the conditions for copy paste errors that can later result in real losses.
Lower fees
Sergeenkov writes that attackers appear to be scaling address poisoning now because sharply lower transaction fees since early December thanks to the Fusaka upgrade have made it cheap enough to spray millions of low-value “dust” transfers, turning an otherwise low probability scam that relies on a handful of large mistakes into an economically viable strategy.
That context complicates the bullish takeaway from Ethereum’s record metrics. Low fees and smooth throughput may signal technical resilience, but they also make spam cheaper to run. If a meaningful share of activity is low-value noise, then rising transaction counts say less about demand for blockspace, decentralized applications or Ethereum itself.
For now, the market appears unconvinced that record usage translates into stronger fundamentals. Until it becomes clearer how much of Ethereum’s activity reflects real users versus automated attacks, raw transaction highs look more like a misleading signal than a catalyst.
Market Movement
BTC: Bitcoin traded slightly higher at about $92,738, up roughly 0.4% on the hour and 0.1% over 24 hours, extending gains of about 1.8% over the past week and 5.0% over the past month.
ETH: Ether hovered around $3,190, up about 0.4% on the hour but down 0.7% over the past 24 hours, while still posting gains of roughly 3.2% over the past week and 7.2% over the past month.
Gold: Gold surged to a record high near $4,675 in early Asian trading as Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on eight European countries over Greenland stoked trade war fears and safe-haven demand, even as strong U.S. data pushed Fed rate cut expectations later into 2026. Wall Street analysts on average see gold at about $5,180 in 2026, implying a roughly 19.3% gain from the 2025 close.
Nikkei 225: Japan’s Nikkei slid about 0.7% as 40-year government bond yields hit fresh highs, while Asia-Pacific markets traded cautiously amid renewed U.S.-EU tariff tensions over Greenland and mounting political uncertainty ahead of a possible Japanese snap election.
Elsewhere in Crypto:
- Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Calls for ‘Different and Better DAOs’ (Decrypt)
- NFTs are not dead: Wealthy crypto collectors are still driving the market, says Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu (CoinDesk)
