Record activity meets market skepticism
Ethereum processed nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, which is an all-time high for the network. That sounds impressive, right? But here’s the thing—Ether’s price didn’t really react much to this news. It was trading around $3,180 on Monday, down about 0.7% for the day. This disconnect between activity and price action is making people wonder what’s really going on.
Usually, when you see transaction counts spike like this, you’d expect fees to rise and validator queues to get longer. That’s the classic supply-demand story. But this time, average fees stayed near recent lows, and validator exit queues actually dropped to zero. Something doesn’t quite add up.
The address poisoning explanation
According to onchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov, this surge might not be what it seems. He thinks a large-scale address poisoning campaign could be behind the numbers. Here’s how that works: scammers send tiny amounts of stablecoins—often less than $1—to thousands of wallets. These are called “dust” transfers.
The goal is to plant fake addresses that look very similar to legitimate ones into people’s transaction histories. When users later copy an address from their history without checking every character, they might accidentally send real funds to the scammer’s lookalike address. It’s a sneaky tactic that relies on human error.
Sergeenkov’s analysis shows stablecoins account for about 80% of the unusual growth in new addresses. Looking at first-time stablecoin interactions, he found that roughly 67% of newly active addresses received less than $1 as their initial transfer. That pattern looks more like automated dusting than organic user onboarding.
Why now, and what it means
The timing matters here. Since early December, Ethereum transaction fees have been much lower thanks to the Fusaka upgrade. This makes it cheaper for scammers to spray millions of these tiny transfers across the network. What was once a low-probability scam becomes economically viable when the cost per transaction drops enough.
Sergeenkov tracked USDT and USDC transfers under $1 and found smart contracts sending dust to hundreds of thousands of wallets. These were funded by functions designed to handle large batches of poisoning addresses in single transactions. It’s efficient, from a scammer’s perspective.
This context complicates how we should interpret Ethereum’s record metrics. Low fees and smooth throughput do show technical resilience, but they also make spam cheaper to run. If a significant portion of activity is just low-value noise, then rising transaction counts might not say much about real demand for blockspace or decentralized applications.
Market response and broader context
The market seems to be taking a cautious view. Bitcoin traded slightly higher at about $92,738, up roughly 0.4% on the hour. Ether showed modest gains of about 0.4% on the hour too, but was still down 0.7% over 24 hours. The muted response suggests traders aren’t convinced record usage translates to stronger fundamentals.
Meanwhile, gold surged to a record high near $4,675 in early Asian trading. Trade war fears and safe-haven demand pushed prices up. Japan’s Nikkei slid about 0.7% as government bond yields hit fresh highs.
For Ethereum, the question remains: how much of this activity is real user demand versus automated attacks? Until that becomes clearer, raw transaction highs might be more of a misleading signal than a true catalyst. It’s a reminder that not all onchain activity tells the same story about network health or adoption.
I think we need to be careful about reading too much into headline numbers without understanding what’s driving them. The mechanics of blockchain allow for all sorts of activity, but not all of it represents genuine economic value or user engagement. Perhaps we’re seeing the downside of lower fees—they enable both legitimate use and malicious activity more easily.
