Stablecoin-fueled dusting attacks are now estimated to make up 11% of all Ethereum transactions and 26% of active addresses on an average day, after the Fusaka upgrade made transactions cheaper, according to Coin Metrics.
Ethereum is now seeing more than 2 million average daily transactions, spiking to almost 2.9 million in mid-January, along with 1.4 million daily active addresses — a 60% increase over prior averages.
The Fusaka upgrade in December made using the network cheaper and easier by improving onchain data handling, reducing the cost of posting information from layer-2 networks back to Ethereum.
Digging through the dust on Ethereum
Coin Metrics said it analyzed over 227 million balance updates for USDC (USDC) and USDt (USDT) on Ethereum from November 2025 through January 2026.
It found that 43% were involved in transfers of less than $1 and 38% were under a single penny — “amounts with insignificant economic purpose other than wallet seeding.”
“The number of addresses holding small ‘dust’ balances, greater than zero but less than 1 native unit, has grown sharply, consistent with millions of wallets receiving tiny poisoning deposits.”
Pre-Fusaka, stablecoin dust accounted for roughly 3 to 5% of Ethereum transactions and 15 to 20% of active addresses, it said.
“Post-Fusaka, these figures jumped to 10-15% of transactions and 25-35% of active addresses on a typical day, a 2-3x increase.”
However, the remaining 57% of balance updates involved transfers above $1, “suggesting the majority of stablecoin activity remains organic,” Coin Metrics stated.
Users need to be wary of address poisoning
In January, security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov pointed to a 170% increase in new wallet addresses in the week starting Jan. 12, and also suggested it was linked to a wave of address poisoning attacks taking advantage of low gas fees.
These “dusting” attacks typically involve malicious actors sending fractions of a cent worth of a stablecoin from wallet addresses that resemble legitimate ones, duping users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.
Related: Ethereum activity surge could be linked to dusting attacks: Researcher
Sergeenkov said $740,000 had already been lost to address poisoning attacks. The top attacker sent nearly 3 million dust transfers for just $5,175 in stablecoin costs, according to Coin Metrics.
Dust does not represent genuine economic usage
Coin Metrics reported that approximately 250,000 to 350,000 daily Ethereum addresses are involved in stablecoin dust activity, but the majority of network growth has been genuine.
“The majority of post-Fusaka growth reflects genuine usage, though dust activity is a factor worth noting when interpreting headline metrics.”
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