How an industrial-scale scam is driving Ethereum transactions to record highs because of cheap gas fees

Ethereum is experiencing record daily network activity, with daily transactions hitting an all-time high of 2.9 million and active addresses surging, all while average gas fees remain negligible (around $0.10 to $0.20). This low cost is attributed to recent protocol upgrades like Pectra, Fusaka, and BPO, which significantly increased blob capacity and throughput, making Layer 1 economically viable for more activities. However, forensic analysis suggests this surge is not organic. Security researchers link the activity to address poisoning campaigns, where attackers use cheap transactions (often sub-$1 stablecoin dust) to seed victims' transaction histories with spoofed addresses resembling legitimate ones. One researcher estimated that roughly 80% of the growth is driven by this malicious stablecoin activity, with smart contracts industrializing the process by funding thousands of poisoning addresses simultaneously. While the conversion rate for these scams is low (around 0.01%), the low cost of transactions makes the scale economically viable for attackers, leading to significant losses for victims and masking the true state of organic network adoption, as indicated by declining metrics like the Metcalfe Ratio.

(Source：CryptoSlate)