After Ethereum’s December Fusaka upgrade lowered transaction costs, dusting attacks tied to stablecoins have increased noticeably. Coin Metrics estimates stablecoin-related dust now represents roughly 11% of daily Ethereum transactions and about 26% of daily active addresses, with broader post-upgrade estimates in the 10–15% and 25–35% ranges respectively.
Network activity has climbed alongside the change: average daily transactions exceed 2 million (peaking near 2.9 million in mid-January) and daily active addresses sit around 1.4 million — roughly a 60% rise over earlier averages. Fusaka reduced costs by improving on-chain data handling and cutting the price of posting layer-2 data back to Ethereum, making small transfers cheaper and more feasible at scale.
Coin Metrics examined more than 227 million balance updates for USDC and USDT on Ethereum from November 2025 through January 2026. It found 43% of those updates were transfers under $1 and 38% were under $0.01—amounts that often serve little economic purpose beyond seeding wallets. The number of addresses holding tiny “dust” balances (greater than zero but less than one native unit) increased sharply, consistent with millions of wallets receiving small poisoning deposits.
Before Fusaka, stablecoin dust accounted for roughly 3–5% of transactions and 15–20% of active addresses; after Fusaka those shares rose roughly 2–3x. Still, Coin Metrics notes 57% of balance updates were transfers above $1, indicating the majority of stablecoin activity remains genuine rather than malicious.
Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov reported a roughly 170% jump in new wallet addresses in the week beginning Jan. 12 and linked the surge to address-poisoning attacks that exploit lower gas fees. Dusting commonly involves sending fractions of a cent of stablecoin from addresses resembling legitimate ones, in hopes recipients will paste the wrong address later. Sergeenkov reported about $740,000 in losses tied to address-poisoning attacks; Coin Metrics identified a top attacker who sent nearly 3 million dust transfers, incurring roughly $5,175 in stablecoin costs.
Coin Metrics estimates some 250,000–350,000 daily Ethereum addresses are involved in stablecoin dust activity. The firm emphasizes that while dusting is a notable factor in post-Fusaka metrics, most of the observed growth appears to reflect genuine increases in network usage rather than purely malicious behavior.