How an industrial-scale scam is driving Ethereum transactions to record highs because of cheap gas fees
Ethereum is presently reporting the best day by day community progress in its historical past, a statistical surge that ostensibly indicators a large return of consumer exercise.
Over the previous week, the Ethereum mainnet processed 2.9 million transactions, a brand new all-time high in accordance to Token Terminal knowledge.
This exercise was accompanied by a pointy leap in day by 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. Average transaction fees have stayed within the “pennies” vary of $0.10 to $0.20 regardless of the record demand.
For a community that traditionally noticed fees spike between $50 and $200 through the 2021-2022 NFT growth, this represented a elementary shift in financial accessibility.
However, forensic evaluation suggests this progress is not completely natural. While 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 fees to launch industrial-scale “deal with poisoning” campaigns, concentrating on customers with automated scams disguised as professional exercise.
The scaling context
To perceive the sudden spike in quantity, one should take 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 Foundation, pointed out that since he entered crypto, Ethereum mainnet fees had been just too high for the common consumer.
He famous the community was too costly for retail, too costly for frequent utilization, and too costly to construct consumer-scale apps.
However, that modified about one 12 months in the past when Ethereum builders methodically scaled the community whereas trying to defend decentralization and safety.
This led to three main protocol upgrades that superior the roadmap.
The first was the May 2025 “Pectra” upgrade, which elevated blob capability by elevating the goal blobs per block from 3 to 6 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 Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). This allowed validators to confirm blob availability by way of sampling reasonably than downloading your entire dataset, enabling larger throughput whereas maintaining 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 had been designed to unlock important capability for the blockchain community.
The financial results of these upgrades grew to become obvious shortly because the community’s mainnet fees dropped sharply, and easy transactions grew to become cheap once more.
Waidmann identified that constructing instantly on Layer 1 grew to become viable at scale, prompting prediction markets, real-world belongings, and funds to transfer again to the mainnet.
At the identical time, stablecoin transfers on the community reached roughly $8 trillion within the fourth quarter.
Ethereum’s record exercise is not including worth
While the record exercise exhibits signs of a blockchain in the ascendancy, on-chain knowledge counsel that these actions haven’t added actual worth to the community.
Data from Alhpractal exhibits that the Metcalfe Ratio, which compares market capitalization to the sq. of the quantity of energetic customers, is declining. This signifies that valuation is not maintaining tempo with actual community adoption.
Additionally, Ethereum’s Adoption Score is presently at degree 1, the bottom tier in its historic vary. This displays a chilly market, with valuation relative to on-chain exercise low.
Considering this, Matthias Seidl, the co-founder of DevelopThePie, prompt that the community’s exercise improve may not be natural.
He cited the instance of a single deal with receiving 190,000 native ETH transfers from 190,000 distinctive wallets in a single day.
Seidl famous the quantity of wallets receiving native transfers is comparatively steady, however the quantity of wallets sending native transfers elevated quite a bit (2x). He highlighted that many native transfers (sending vanilla ETH) use solely 21,000 gas, the most affordable type of EVM transaction.
These are presently accounting for nearly 50% of all transactions. In comparability, sending an ERC20 token prices roughly 65,000 gas, and one stablecoin switch wants as a lot gas as three native ETH transfers.
Address poisoning?
Meanwhile, Ethereum’s newest burst of on-chain exercise is being traced to an previous scam, repackaged for a cheaper-fee period.
Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov noted {that a} wave of address-poisoning campaigns has been exploiting low gas 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 these assaults are easy: scammers generate “poisoning” addresses that resemble a goal’s professional pockets deal with by matching the primary and final characters. After a sufferer completes a traditional switch, the attacker sends a small “mud” transaction to the sufferer so the spoofed deal with seems of their latest historical past.
The wager is that, at some later level, the consumer will copy the familiar-looking deal with from their exercise feed with out verifying the total string.
Considering this, Sergeenkov ties the surge in new Ethereum addresses to that playbook. He estimates new deal with 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 reasonably than natural consumer demand.
To check whether or not this regarded like poisoning, Sergeenkov regarded 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 shifting 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, had been good contracts designed to industrialize the marketing campaign. These are codes that may bankroll and coordinate a whole bunch 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 gas to a big batch of poisoning addresses directly.
Those addresses then fan out, sending mud to thousands and thousands of potential targets to manufacture 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 price at round 0.01%, implying the enterprise is constructed to tolerate excessive failure charges. In 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 instantly generate income until a sufferer mis-sends funds.
Sergeenkov argues that, till late 2025, Ethereum community fees made the mass-send technique more durable to justify. However, with transaction prices roughly six-fold decrease, the risk-reward calculus shifted sharply in favor of the attacker.
Considering this, Sergeenkov argued that scaling Ethereum throughput with out hardening its user-facing security has created an surroundings the place “record” exercise may be indistinguishable from automated abuse.
In his view, the trade’s obsession with headline community metrics dangers masking a darker actuality during which cheaper blockspace can simply subsidize mass-targeted scams as professional adoption, leaving retail customers to bear the loss.
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