Ethereum Post Fusako Record Activity: Real Growth or Dust Attack Noise?
Ethereum has also recently made headlines, with almost 2.9 million processed transactions in a single day 0, the highest of all recorded by the network. On the surface, this appears to be a great indicator that the blockchain is flourishing after the huge Fusako upgrade. But new research is showing a more nuanced picture and that much of this spike may not be reflecting genuine network use.
The Fusaka upgrade, which was launched in early December 2025, made transactions significantly cheaper, making it much cheaper to transact a transaction on ethereum. That was one of its main objectives to enhance accessibility and expand the network for future expansion.
However, lower fees have also allowed opportunistic actors in. Researchers analyzing Ethereum’s transaction history found a large increase in “dust transfers” small, often less than $1 transfers of stablecoins to millions of wallets. These are not usual things that users do such as changing tokens or communicating with smart contracts. Rather, they’re part of “address poisoning” attacks, where the attackers flood wallets with small transfers from addresses similar-looking to legitimate addresses.
The goal?
To litter transaction histories with addresses from scams that unsuspecting people may copy and send money to in the future out of error. This becomes possible due to the fact that wallet interfaces often abbreviate addresses showing just the first and last few characters. When users cut out of history without looking carefully, they may be led astray.
According to the analysis, this comes to mean that these types of dust transactions account for a substantial fraction of Ethereum’s activity. While there is some data that can be used to prove that overall activity is real and strong, when we use adjusted measures where we only see the transactions which were really more than low value activity, the estimate is that we only see something like 11% of the transactions are real, real activity that is used by real users.
That has important implications: Headline transaction numbers may overstate network demand. While Fusaka succeeded in its goal of reducing the cost of transactions, it also made it economically feasible for attackers to carry on large-scale dust campaigns because the cost of sending millions of tiny transfers is now so low.
This doesn’t discount the long-term worth of the Fusako upgrade, especially for developers and legitimate users. But it does emphasize the importance of digging below the surface metrics when it comes to assessing the growth of blockchain. As Ethereum keeps on evolving and evolving, the ability to discern between meaningful adoption signals and activity noise will be very important not only for the community but also for investors who track the performance of the network.
