Ethereum is processing more transactions than ever, but part of the surge now carries a clear security warning: low fees have made address-poisoning attacks cheaper to run at scale.
Ethereum logged a record 3,627,491 transactions on April 28, setting a new all-time high for daily transaction count. At the same time, average Ethereum transaction fees remain compressed, with the latest average fee near $0.2132 per transaction on May 22, down 58.34% from one year earlier.
That combination looks bullish at first glance. A network handling record activity at lower cost is exactly what Ethereum scaling was supposed to deliver. The problem is that not every transaction now represents meaningful user demand, DeFi activity, stablecoin settlement or app growth. A growing share is tied to dust transfers and address-poisoning campaigns that exploit the same cheap execution environment.
Address poisoning is a social-engineering attack that targets how users copy wallet addresses. Attackers generate lookalike addresses that mimic the beginning and ending characters of legitimate addresses, then send tiny transfers to victims so the fake address appears in their wallet or explorer history. If the user later copies the wrong address, funds can be sent directly to the attacker.
The attack has become more attractive because the cost of failure is now lower. A single poisoning attempt succeeds only about 0.01% of the time, roughly one successful trick for every 10,000 attempts. That rate is tiny, but the economics work when attackers can send thousands or millions of dust transfers cheaply and one large mistake can pay for the entire campaign.
Fusaka Made Ethereum Cheaper And Attackers Faster
Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade went live in December 2025 to expand scalability and reduce transaction costs. The upgrade helped Ethereum absorb more activity, but cheaper execution also lowered the cost of spam-like behavior.
In the 90 days after Fusaka, Ethereum processed about 30% more transactions per day than in the 90 days before the upgrade, while new addresses created each day rose by about 78%. Dust-transfer activity also jumped sharply. Sub-$0.01 USDT dust transfers rose from 4.2 million before Fusaka to 29.9 million after it, a 612% increase. USDC dust transfers rose 473%, DAI dust transfers rose 470%, and tiny ETH transfers below 0.00001 ETH rose 62%.
Independent network research reached a similar conclusion. Post-Fusaka stablecoin dust was estimated to account for about 11% of all Ethereum transactions and 26% of active addresses on an average day. Across 227 million USDC and USDT balance updates, 43% were dust transfers under $1, while 38% were under one cent.
Those numbers do not mean Ethereum’s activity is fake. The same research still found that most stablecoin balance updates involved transfers above $1, and Ethereum continues to support real DeFi, stablecoin, app, NFT, trading and settlement demand. The issue is measurement. Raw transaction counts now mix organic network usage with a larger amount of security-abuse traffic.
That makes the “fees at lows, activity at highs” story more complicated for ETH. Low fees are good for users, developers and applications. They are also good for attackers trying to poison transaction histories at industrial scale.
ETH Value Capture Faces A Harder Debate
ETH is trading near $2,116, with the market still debating whether Ethereum’s higher activity is translating into stronger token economics. The record-activity argument has already supported the bullish side after Ethereum recorded its highest quarterly network activity, but lower fees reduce the amount of ETH burned and weaken the short-term value-capture story.
That is the uncomfortable tradeoff. Higher fees make Ethereum more expensive for ordinary users, but they also raise the cost of address-poisoning attempts and increase ETH burn through the fee mechanism. Lower fees make Ethereum more usable, but they allow dust campaigns to scale and make raw activity data noisier.
Ethereum does not need permanently high fees to prove value. It needs cleaner activity, better wallet protection and stronger filtering around poisoned transfers. Wallet address books, ENS names, private labels, transaction-history warnings and explorer-level spam suppression all become more important when the network is cheap enough for attackers to flood users with lookalike entries.
The current data leaves Ethereum with a sharper test than the usual fee debate. Record transaction activity is real, but part of it is now security-abuse traffic made cheaper by the same scaling upgrades that improved user access. ETH’s stronger case will come from sustained organic activity, stablecoin and DeFi growth above dust levels, better poisoning defenses, and fee economics that support the token without turning normal Ethereum use expensive again.
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