Stablecoin-related dust activity now accounts for roughly 11% of Ethereum transactions and 26% of active addresses on an average day, Coin Metrics estimates, after the December Fusaka upgrade lowered transaction costs. “Dusting” attacks — tiny transfers sent from look-alike addresses to trick users into copying the wrong address — have become more common as onchain activity rose.
Ethereum is seeing more than 2 million average daily transactions (peaking near 2.9 million in mid-January) and about 1.4 million daily active addresses, a roughly 60% increase over earlier averages. Fusaka made using the network cheaper by improving onchain data handling and lowering the cost to post layer-2 data back to Ethereum.
Coin Metrics analyzed over 227 million balance updates for USDC and USDT on Ethereum from November 2025 through January 2026. It found 43% of updates involved transfers under $1 and 38% were under $0.01 — amounts with little economic purpose beyond “wallet seeding.” The number of addresses holding small “dust” balances (greater than zero but less than one native unit) has grown sharply, consistent with millions of wallets receiving tiny poisoning deposits.
Before Fusaka, stablecoin dust made up roughly 3–5% of transactions and 15–20% of active addresses. Post-Fusaka, Coin Metrics says those figures rose to about 10–15% of transactions and 25–35% of active addresses on a typical day — a roughly 2–3x increase. Still, 57% of balance updates were transfers above $1, indicating the majority of stablecoin activity remains organic.
Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov flagged a 170% increase in new wallet addresses in the week starting Jan. 12, linking the surge to address-poisoning attacks exploiting lower gas fees. Dusting typically involves sending fractions of a cent of stablecoin from addresses resembling legitimate ones to dupe users into pasting incorrect addresses. Sergeenkov reported about $740,000 lost to address-poisoning attacks; Coin Metrics noted the top attacker sent nearly 3 million dust transfers for roughly $5,175 in stablecoin costs.
Coin Metrics estimates 250,000–350,000 daily Ethereum addresses are involved in stablecoin dust activity, but emphasizes most post-Fusaka growth reflects genuine usage. “The majority of post-Fusaka growth reflects genuine usage, though dust activity is a factor worth noting when interpreting headline metrics.”
