Ethereum’s recent daily transaction record may be more smoke than signal. Last week the network processed nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day — an all-time high — but Ether’s price barely budged and average fees stayed near recent lows. On-chain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov says much of that surge wasn’t genuine user demand but an explosion of “address poisoning” spam. What happened - Sergeenkov’s analysis finds stablecoins are driving roughly 80% of the unusual growth in new addresses. - About 67% of newly active addresses received very small amounts as their first stablecoin transfer, a pattern consistent with automated distribution rather than organic onboarding. - In a sampled cohort of 5.78 million addresses, roughly 3.86 million received what the researcher calls “poisoning dust” as their initial stablecoin transaction. - The campaign appears coordinated: senders (including smart contracts) distributed tiny stablecoin amounts to at least 10,000 unique addresses, with some contracts funding hundreds of thousands of transfers in a single batch. How the scam works Address poisoning floods wallets with near-zero stablecoin transfers to create fake-looking entries in users’ transaction histories. Since many wallets display only the start and end of an address, maliciously seeded addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones can trick users into copying and pasting a fraudulent address and sending funds to attackers. Why it’s possible now Sergeenkov links the spike to lower transaction fees following December’s Fusaka upgrade. Cheaper gas made mass distribution of low-value transfers economically viable — turning a previously limited nuisance into a scalable attack vector. Validator exit queues also fell to zero during the period, underscoring network stability even as transaction counts climbed. Why this matters High throughput and low fees are generally positive signs for Ethereum’s tech, but they also lower the cost barrier for spam. If a substantial share of new transactions are low-value “dust” distributions, headline transaction counts can mislead observers about real demand for blockspace, decentralized apps, or active users. The episode underscores the need for richer on-chain metrics that separate meaningful activity from automated noise. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news