Ethereum is presently reporting the best each day community progress 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 in line with Token Terminal information.
This exercise was accompanied by a pointy bounce in each 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 report demand.
For a community that traditionally noticed charges spike between $50 and $200 in the course of the 2021-2022 NFT growth, this represented a basic shift in financial accessibility.
Nonetheless, forensic evaluation suggests this progress isn’t solely 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 “deal with poisoning” campaigns, focusing on customers with automated scams disguised as respectable exercise.
The scaling context
To know the sudden spike in quantity, one should take 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 typical 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 3 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 by way of sampling somewhat than downloading all the dataset, enabling larger throughput whereas conserving node necessities affordable.
Most just lately, 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 important 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 instantly 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 identical time, stablecoin transfers on the community reached roughly $8 trillion within the fourth quarter.
Ethereum’s report exercise isn’t including worth
Whereas the report exercise exhibits indicators of a blockchain within the ascendancy, on-chain information recommend that these actions haven’t added actual worth to the community.
Information from Alhpractal exhibits that the Metcalfe Ratio, which compares market capitalization to the sq. of the variety of lively customers, is declining. This means that valuation isn’t conserving tempo with actual community adoption.
Moreover, Ethereum’s Adoption Rating is presently 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 enhance 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 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 gasoline, the most affordable type of EVM transaction.
These are presently accounting for nearly 50% of all transactions. As compared, sending an ERC20 token prices roughly 65,000 gasoline, and one stablecoin switch wants as a lot gasoline as three native ETH transfers.
Deal with 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 famous {that a} wave of address-poisoning campaigns has been exploiting low gasoline 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 respectable pockets deal with 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 deal with seems of their current historical past.
The guess is that, at some later level, the person will copy the familiar-looking deal with 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 deal with creation ran about 2.7 occasions 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 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 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 at the least 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 tons of 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 gasoline to a big batch of poisoning addresses directly.
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 charge 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 value. Deal with poisoning calls for tens of millions of on-chain transactions that don’t instantly 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 setting the place “report” exercise will be indistinguishable from automated abuse.
In his view, the business’s obsession with headline community metrics dangers masking a darker actuality wherein cheaper blockspace can simply subsidize mass-targeted scams as respectable adoption, leaving retail customers to bear the loss.
