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Ethereum is posting record onchain activity, but ETH’s muted price action suggests the surge may not reflect real user demand.
The network processed nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, an all-time high, even as average fees stayed near recent lows and validator exit queues dropped to zero. In past cycles, that combination would have fed a familiar narrative of rising demand, tighter blockspace, and mounting pressure on ETH supply. This time, price action is telling a different story. Ether was trading around $3,180 on Monday, down roughly 0.7% on the day and still lagging the broader momentum of the CoinDesk 20 index.
According to onchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov, the surge in activity might be from a large-scale address poisoning campaign, where scammers flood wallets with tiny stablecoin “dust” transfers to plant lookalike addresses into transaction histories, inflating transaction counts without reflecting genuine user demand.
In address poisoning attacks, scammers generate wallet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones and then send small, often sub-$1 stablecoin transfers to potential victims.
Those dust transactions insert the fake addresses into a user’s transaction history, where wallets typically display only shortened prefixes and suffixes.
When users later copy an address from that history without verifying every character, they can mistakenly send real funds to the attacker’s lookalike address, turning what appears to be routine activity into a costly error.
Sergeenkov’s analysis shows the recent jump in Ethereum activity is closely tied to stablecoins, which account for roughly 80% of the unusual growth in new addresses.
Looking at first-time stablecoin interactions, he found that about 67% of newly active addresses received less than $1 as their initial transfer, a pattern consistent with automated dusting rather than organic onboarding. In total, roughly 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses in the sample received what he classifies as poisoning dust as their first stablecoin transaction.
To identify the source of that activity, Sergeenkov tracked USDT and USDC transfers under $1 and isolated senders that distributed dust to at least 10,000 unique addresses. The largest of those were smart contracts that sent tiny amounts of stablecoins to hundreds of thousands of wallets, financed by a function designed to fund large batches of poisoning addresses in a single transaction.