Ethereum is at the moment reporting the very best every day community development in its historical past, a statistical surge that ostensibly indicators a large return of person exercise.
Over the previous week, the Ethereum mainnet processed 2.9 million transactions, a brand new all-time excessive in accordance with Token Terminal knowledge.
This exercise was accompanied by a pointy bounce in every day energetic 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 report demand.
For a community that traditionally noticed charges spike between $50 and $200 through the 2021-2022 NFT growth, this represented a elementary shift in financial accessibility.
Nonetheless, forensic evaluation suggests this development is just not 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 “handle poisoning” campaigns, concentrating on customers with automated scams disguised as reputable exercise.
The scaling context
To grasp the sudden spike in quantity, one should have a look at the current 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, identified that since he entered crypto, Ethereum mainnet charges had 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.
Nonetheless, that modified about one yr in the past when Ethereum builders methodically scaled the community whereas making an attempt to guard decentralization and safety.
This led to a few main protocol upgrades that superior the roadmap.
The primary was the Might 2025 “Pectra” improve, 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 community’s “Fusaka” improve adopted in December 2025, transport Peer Information Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). This allowed validators to confirm blob availability through sampling quite than downloading all the dataset, enabling increased throughput whereas preserving node necessities affordable.
Most not too long ago, the Blob Parameter-Solely (BPO) fork in January 2026 raised the blob goal from 10 to 14 and the max to 21. These pragmatic updates had been designed to unlock vital capability for the blockchain community.
The financial results of those upgrades grew to become obvious rapidly 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 report exercise is just not including worth
Whereas the report exercise reveals indicators of a blockchain within the ascendancy, on-chain knowledge recommend that these actions haven’t added actual worth to the community.
Information from Alhpractal reveals that the Metcalfe Ratio, which compares market capitalization to the sq. of the variety of energetic customers, is declining. This means that valuation is just not preserving 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 won’t be natural.
He cited the instance of a single handle 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 secure, 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 previous rip-off, repackaged for a cheaper-fee period.
Safety researcher Andrey Sergeenkov famous {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 reputable pockets handle 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 handle seems of their current historical past.
The guess is that, at some later level, the person will copy the familiar-looking handle from their exercise feed with out verifying the complete string.
Contemplating this, Sergeenkov ties the surge in new Ethereum addresses to that playbook. He estimates new handle 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 quite than natural person demand.
To check whether or not this seemed like poisoning, Sergeenkov seemed for a telltale signature: addresses that obtained a sub-$1 stablecoin switch as their first interplay.
By his rely, 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 no less than 10,000 addresses. What surfaced, he says, had been good contracts designed to industrialize the marketing campaign. These are codes that may bankroll and coordinate a whole lot of poisoning addresses in a single transaction.
One contract he reviewed included a operate 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 complete.
The gating issue has traditionally been price. Handle poisoning calls for tens of millions of on-chain transactions that don’t immediately generate income except a sufferer mis-sends funds.
Sergeenkov argues that, till late 2025, Ethereum community charges made the mass-send technique more durable to justify. Nonetheless, 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 “report” exercise may be indistinguishable from automated abuse.
In his view, the trade’s obsession with headline community metrics dangers masking a darker actuality through which cheaper blockspace can simply subsidize mass-targeted scams as reputable adoption, leaving retail customers to bear the loss.