Ethereum is at the moment reporting the very best day by day community development in its historical past, a statistical surge that ostensibly alerts an enormous return of person exercise.
Over the previous week, the Ethereum mainnet processed 2.9 million transactions, a brand new all-time excessive based on Token Terminal information.
This exercise was accompanied by a pointy bounce in day by day lively addresses, which rose to roughly 1.3 million from roughly 0.6 million in late December.
Critically, this explosion in throughput has occurred whereas transaction prices have remained negligible. Common transaction charges have stayed within the “pennies” vary of $0.10 to $0.20 regardless of the file demand.
For a community that traditionally noticed charges spike between $50 and $200 in the course of the 2021-2022 NFT increase, this represented a elementary shift in financial accessibility.
Nevertheless, forensic evaluation suggests this development will not be totally natural. Whereas floor metrics point out a bull-market revival, safety researchers warn that a good portion of this visitors is pushed by malicious actors.
These attackers are exploiting the community’s newly lowered charges to launch industrial-scale “tackle poisoning” campaigns, concentrating on customers with automated scams disguised as legit exercise.
The scaling context
To grasp the sudden spike in quantity, one should have a look at the latest structural adjustments to the Ethereum protocol. For years, the community was highly effective however economically unusable for most individuals.
Leon Waidmann, head of analysis on the Onchain Basis, pointed out that since he entered crypto, Ethereum mainnet charges have been just too excessive for the common person.
He famous the community was too costly for retail, too costly for frequent utilization, and too costly to construct consumer-scale apps.
Nevertheless, that modified about one 12 months in the past when Ethereum builders methodically scaled the community whereas making an attempt to guard decentralization and safety.
This led to 3 main protocol upgrades that superior the roadmap.
The primary was the May 2025 “Pectra” upgrade, which elevated blob capability by elevating the goal blobs per block from 3 to six and the max from 6 to 9. This successfully doubled anticipated blob throughput.
Then, the network’s “Fusaka” upgrade adopted in December 2025, transport Peer Knowledge Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). This allowed validators to confirm blob availability by way of sampling somewhat than downloading all the dataset, enabling increased throughput whereas conserving node necessities cheap.
Most not too long ago, the Blob Parameter-Only (BPO) fork in January 2026 raised the blob goal from 10 to 14 and the max to 21. These pragmatic updates have been designed to unlock vital capability for the blockchain community.
The financial results of those upgrades grew to become obvious shortly because the community’s mainnet charges dropped sharply, and easy transactions grew to become low cost once more.
Waidmann identified that constructing immediately on Layer 1 grew to become viable at scale, prompting prediction markets, real-world belongings, and funds to maneuver again to the mainnet.
On the similar time, stablecoin transfers on the community reached roughly $8 trillion within the fourth quarter.
Ethereum’s file exercise will not be including worth
Whereas the file exercise reveals signs of a blockchain in the ascendancy, on-chain information counsel that these actions haven’t added actual worth to the community.
Data from Alhpractal reveals that the Metcalfe Ratio, which compares market capitalization to the sq. of the variety of lively customers, is declining. This means that valuation will not be conserving tempo with actual community adoption.
Moreover, Ethereum’s Adoption Rating is at the moment at stage 1, the bottom tier in its historic vary. This displays a chilly market, with valuation relative to on-chain exercise low.
Contemplating this, Matthias Seidl, the co-founder of GrowThePie, urged that the community’s exercise improve may not be natural.
He cited the instance of a single tackle receiving 190,000 native ETH transfers from 190,000 distinctive wallets in a single day.
Seidl famous the variety of wallets receiving native transfers is comparatively steady, however the variety of wallets sending native transfers elevated lots (2x). He highlighted that many native transfers (sending vanilla ETH) use solely 21,000 fuel, the most cost effective type of EVM transaction.
These are at the moment accounting for nearly 50% of all transactions. Compared, sending an ERC20 token prices roughly 65,000 fuel, and one stablecoin switch wants as a lot fuel as three native ETH transfers.
Handle poisoning?
In the meantime, Ethereum’s newest burst of on-chain exercise is being traced to an outdated rip-off, repackaged for a cheaper-fee period.
Safety researcher Andrey Sergeenkov noted {that a} wave of address-poisoning campaigns has been exploiting low fuel prices since December, inflating community metrics whereas seeding transaction histories with lookalike addresses designed to trick customers into sending actual funds to attackers.
The mechanics of those assaults are easy: scammers generate “poisoning” addresses that resemble a goal’s legit pockets tackle by matching the primary and final characters. After a sufferer completes a standard switch, the attacker sends a small “mud” transaction to the sufferer so the spoofed tackle seems of their latest historical past.
The wager is that, at some later level, the person will copy the familiar-looking tackle from their exercise feed with out verifying the total string.
Contemplating this, Sergeenkov ties the surge in new Ethereum addresses to that playbook. He estimates new tackle creation ran about 2.7 instances the 2025 common, with the week of Jan. 12 peaking at roughly 2.7 million new addresses.
When he decomposed the flows behind the expansion, he concluded that roughly 80% was pushed by stablecoin exercise somewhat than natural person demand.
To check whether or not this appeared like poisoning, Sergeenkov appeared for a telltale signature: addresses that obtained a sub-$1 stablecoin switch as their first interplay.
By his depend, 67% of the brand new addresses match that sample. In absolute phrases, he discovered 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses obtained “mud” as their first stablecoin transaction.
He then narrowed the search to the senders: accounts transferring lower than $1 of USDT and USDC between Dec. 15, 2025, and Jan. 18, 2026.
Sergeenkov counted distinctive recipients for every sender and filtered for these distributing to a minimum of 10,000 addresses. What surfaced, he says, have been good contracts designed to industrialize the marketing campaign. These are codes that may bankroll and coordinate tons of of poisoning addresses in a single transaction.
One contract he reviewed included a perform labeled `fundPoisoners`, which, in his description, disperses stablecoin mud and a small quantity of ETH for fuel to a big batch of poisoning addresses without delay.
These addresses then fan out, sending mud to tens of millions of potential targets to fabricate deceptive entries in pockets transaction histories.
The mannequin depends on scale as most recipients won’t ever fall for it, however the economics work if a tiny fraction do.
Sergeenkov pegs the efficient conversion fee at round 0.01%, implying the enterprise is constructed to tolerate excessive failure charges. Within the dataset he analyzed, 116 victims collectively misplaced about $740,000, with one loss accounting for $509,000 of that whole.
The gating issue has traditionally been price. Address poisoning demands millions of on-chain transactions that don’t immediately generate income until a sufferer mis-sends funds.
Sergeenkov argues that, till late 2025, Ethereum community charges made the mass-send technique tougher to justify. Nevertheless, with transaction prices roughly six-fold decrease, the risk-reward calculus shifted sharply in favor of the attacker.
Contemplating this, Sergeenkov argued that scaling Ethereum throughput with out hardening its user-facing security has created an surroundings the place “file” exercise will be indistinguishable from automated abuse.
In his view, the trade’s obsession with headline community metrics dangers masking a darker actuality wherein cheaper blockspace can simply subsidize mass-targeted scams as legit adoption, leaving retail customers to bear the loss.
