Ethereum Breaks Activity Records But ETH Price Remains Stalled: The Truth Behind the Transaction Boom

Ethereum just recorded an impressive milestone: nearly 2.9 million transactions in a single day last week, an all-time high for the network. However, this news has not generated the expected enthusiasm in the market. ETH price hovers around $2,830, down 5.79% over the past 24 hours, a behavior that contrasts sharply with what one would expect from record activity. The reality, as detailed chain analyses reveal, is much more complex and worrying than the raw figures suggest.

Mass transactions driven by coordinated scams, not actual demand

The Ethereum paradox has a disturbing explanation. The exponential increase in onchain activity does not reflect genuine adoption of decentralized applications or organic user growth, but rather massive “address poisoning” campaigns run by coordinated fraudsters.

Blockchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov has documented that roughly 80% of the unusual increase in new Ethereum addresses is directly linked to small transfers of stablecoin “dust.” These attacks work simply but effectively: fraudsters generate wallet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones, then send negligible amounts of stablecoins (often below $1) to potential victims. When these transfers appear in a wallet’s transaction history, where only abbreviated prefixes and suffixes are typically displayed, unsuspecting users may mistake the fake address for the genuine one. The result: by copying what they believe to be a legitimate address, they transfer real funds to the attacker’s wallet, turning what would seem like a routine operation into a tangible loss.

Sergeenkov’s analysis is revealing. It found that roughly 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses in its sample received what it classified as “contaminating dust” in its first stablecoin transaction. Of those, 67% received less than $1 as an initial transfer, a pattern that is far from the organic onboarding of new users.

Stablecoins as vehicles of attack

The link between increased transactions and stablecoins is undeniable. After tracing USDT and USDC transfers of less than $1, Sergeenkov identified issuers distributing “dust” to tens of thousands of unique addresses simultaneously. The most aggressive of these were smart contracts funded to execute multiple stablecoin transfers in a single batch transaction, subsequently dispersing these tainted addresses throughout the network.

This phenomenon dramatically inflates transaction counters and the metrics of new addresses, while creating the conditions ripe for massive frauds. What’s concerning is that this harmful activity is completely indistinguishable from legitimate activity in basic blockchain statistics.

Low fees transformed spam into a viable business

This is where a critical factor comes in: Ethereum transaction fees. Since the beginning of December, following the Fusaka upgrade, network costs plummeted significantly. Sergeenkov points out that this fee reduction was the catalyst that transformed address poisoning from a fringe scam, dependent on occasional errors, into an economically viable strategy on a massive scale.

When executing millions of spam transactions costs just a few dollars, the fraudster’s business model becomes profitable even with extremely low success rates. A scammer only needs to persuade a small percentage of users to make the mistake of copying a fake address from their history, and the campaign is already financially justified. Low fees, which under normal circumstances would be good news for Ethereum’s scalability, have become an enabler of systemic fraud.

Market on the move: Bitcoin falls, gold rises, Asian markets in the red

The most recent market data paints a volatile picture. Bitcoin is trading at $84,400, reflecting a 5.83% drop in the last 24 hours and a 5.70% drop in the last week. Ethereum, already mentioned, drops in parallel to $2,830. Gold, in contrast, saw a significant rally, hitting record highs near $4,675 in early Asian trading, driven by renewed fears about trade wars and demand for safe-haven assets.

Asian markets showed general weakness. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell roughly 0.7%, weighed down by 40-year government bond yields hitting new highs and growing political uncertainty. Macroeconomic volatility has created a risk-off environment that disproportionately penalizes digital assets.

Implications for Ethereum: Misleading Signal or Real Problem

The conclusion is uncomfortable but necessary: Ethereum’s transaction records, when broken down into their actual components, reveal mostly noise generated by fraud at scale, not genuine adoption. The low fees and technical fluidity of the network may indicate technological resilience, but they also dramatically make it cheaper to execute coordinated attacks.

While the community and market participants do not clearly distinguish what portion of the activity represents real users versus automated attacks, these highs in gross transactions function more as a misleading signal than as a true catalyst for the price. The market, for now, seems to be rightly skeptical about whether record usage translates into more robust fundamentals for Ethereum.

Complementary developments in the crypto ecosystem

On other fronts in the sector, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has urged the community to develop “different and better DAOs,” prompting reflections on future decentralized governance.

NFTs continue to demonstrate selective resilience. Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu argues that high-net-worth crypto collectors continue to drive the market, challenging the NFT death narrative. Pudgy Penguins emerges as a particularly notable success story, evolving from speculative “digital luxury goods” to a multi-platform intellectual property platform. Its strategy of user acquisition through conventional channels (toys, retail partnerships, viral media) followed by onboarding to Web3 through games and the PENGU token has proven effective, with Pudgy Party surpassing 500,000 downloads in two weeks.

Market liquidity showed stress as Bitcoin pulled back towards the $84,000 zone, triggering more than $650 million in liquidations across the crypto market. A funding gauge suggests a temporary bottom may be near, though analysts say a sustained bullish turn may not materialize until the Federal Reserve adopts significantly looser monetary policy.