Ethereum dust attacks have increased post-Fusaka
After the Fusaka update made transactions cheaper, stablecoin-related dust activity is now estimated to account for 11% of all Ethereum transactions and an average of 26% of active addresses per day.
“Dushing” attacks are a type of address poisoning where attackers send small crypto transfers from the same wallet addresses to trick users into copying the wrong address.
Ethereum is now seeing more than 2 million average daily transactions, up from nearly 2.9 million in mid-January, with 1.4 million daily active addresses – a 60% increase from the previous average.
December's Fusaka update improved on-chain data handling, making it cheaper and easier to use the network, reducing the cost of transferring data from layer-2 networks back to Ethereum.
Mining on Ethereum
Coin Metrics says it analyzed more than 227 million account transactions for USDC (USDC) and USDt (USDT) on Ethereum between November 2025 and January 2026.
Forty-three percent were involved in transfers of less than $1, and 38 percent were under a penny — an amount that “has no meaningful economic purpose other than pocketing the wallet.”
“Addresses containing small ‘dust' scales greater than zero but less than 1 have grown in line with millions of wallets containing tiny concentrations of poison.”
Pre-Fusaka, Stalkcoin Dust accounted for 3 to 5 percent of Ethereum transactions and 15 to 20 percent of addresses, he said.
“Post-Fusaka, these figures increased to 10-15% of transactions and 25-35% of active contacts on a typical day, 2-3x.
However, the remaining 57% of account updates involved transfers of more than $1, “suggesting that the majority of stablecoin activity is organic,” according to Coin Metrics.
Users should beware of address poisoning
In January, security researcher Andrey Sergenkov noted a 170% increase in new wallet addresses in the week starting January 12th, and also suggested that it was linked to a wave of address poisoning attacks taking advantage of low gas bills.
These “dust” attacks typically involve malicious actors sending fractions of a penny worth of stablecoins from legitimate-looking wallet addresses, tricking users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.
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According to Sergenkov, 740,000 dollars have already been lost to solve the poisoning attacks. Top Attacker has sent nearly 3 million Dust transfers with stable coin costs of $5,175, according to Coin Metrics.
Dust does not represent a real economic use.
Coin Metrics reports that approximately 250,000 to 350,000 daily Ethereum addresses participate in stablecoin dust activity, but most of the network's growth is real.
“While most of the post-Fusaka growth reflects real usage, it's worth noting that dust movement interprets headline metrics.”
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