Ethereum bulls face deceptive on-chain spike as address poisoning surges

Ethereum just hit a 2.9m tx record, but on-chain data shows cheap address poisoning spam, not real demand, driving much of the activity after Fusaka.

Ethereum processed nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, marking an all-time high for the blockchain network, according to on-chain data. However, the record activity has not translated into corresponding price gains for Ether, raising questions about the nature of the transaction surge.

Ethereum transactions surge

Average transaction fees remained near recent lows during the period, while validator exit queues dropped to zero. Despite these metrics, Ether’s price showed limited movement compared to broader market trends.

On-chain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov attributed the increase in activity to a large-scale address poisoning campaign. In such attacks, malicious actors flood wallets with small stablecoin transfers to create false addresses and inflate transaction counts, according to Sergeenkov’s analysis.

Address poisoning attacks involve scammers generating wallet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones, then sending minimal or near-zero stablecoin transfers to potential victims. These transactions insert fake addresses into a user’s transaction history. Wallets typically display only shortened prefixes and suffixes of addresses, creating opportunities for users to inadvertently copy fraudulent addresses and send funds to attackers.

Sergeenkov’s research indicates that stablecoins account for approximately 80% of the unusual growth in new addresses. Analysis of first-time stablecoin interactions revealed that about 67% of newly active addresses received very small amounts as their initial transfer, a pattern consistent with automated distribution rather than organic user adoption.

Approximately 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses in the sample received what Sergeenkov characterized as “poisoning dust” as their first stablecoin transaction, according to the analysis.

Sergeenkov traced small stablecoin transfers and identified senders that distributed dust to at least 10,000 unique addresses. The largest sources were smart contracts that sent minimal amounts of stablecoins to hundreds of thousands of wallets, funded through a function designed to finance large batches of poisoning addresses in a single transaction, the research showed.

Lower transaction fees since early December, following the Fusaka upgrade, have made it economically feasible to distribute millions of low-value transfers, according to Sergeenkov. The reduced costs have transformed what was previously an infrequent scam into a more viable strategy for attackers.

The findings suggest that while low fees and smooth throughput may indicate technical improvements to the Ethereum network, they also reduce the cost barrier for spam activities. If a substantial portion of recent on-chain activity consists of low-value transactions, rising transaction counts may provide limited insight into actual demand for blockspace, decentralized applications, or the blockchain network itself, according to the analysis.