Fusaka's Fee Cut: A 2-3x Surge in Dust Transactions

The Fusaka upgrade triggered a dramatic spike in stablecoin dust transactions. Pre-upgrade, dust made up roughly 3 to 5% of Ethereum transactions and 15 to 20% of active addresses. Post-upgrade, those figures jumped to 10-15% of transactions and 25-35% of active addresses on a typical day-a clear 2-3x surge.

This surge is directly linked to cheaper fees that revived stablecoin usage on mainnet, enabling large-scale spam. The primary driver is the economic viability of address poisoning attacks, where malicious actors seed millions of wallets with tiny stablecoin deposits to trick users later.

The financial impact is already material, with $740,000 already lost to these attacks. While the majority of stablecoin activity remains organic, this dust activity inflates headline metrics and represents a significant cost of the post-upgrade network comeback.

The Mechanics of the Attack: Cheap Fees, High Volume

The technical changes from Fusaka created the perfect conditions for this surge. The upgrade increased the block gas limit to 60 million and introduced PeerDAS, which reduces data availability costs by up to 85%. This combination slashed transaction fees, making it economically feasible to send millions of low-value transactions.

The resulting network growth is stark. Average daily transactions jumped by ~50%, and daily active addresses rose ~60%. On January 16th, transactions spiked above 2.8 million, a clear signal of revived mainnet activity.

This is where the attack mechanism takes hold. Cheap fees allow attackers to spray tiny stablecoin deposits to millions of wallets simultaneously. This address poisoning seeds wallets with minimal cost, inflating active address counts and creating a vector for social engineering scams.

Implications for Network Health and What to Watch

The key point is that the majority of post-Fusaka growth reflects genuine usage. While stablecoin dust now makes up 11% of transactions and 26% of active addresses, the remaining 57% of balance updates involve transfers above $1, suggesting organic activity. Headline metrics like daily active addresses need adjustment to filter out this low-value spam.

The primary risk is that cheap fees enable abuse, creating a friction point. This address poisoning has already caused $740,000 in losses and could lead to regulatory scrutiny or user backlash that dampens the organic growth surge. The network's comeback is real, but its quality is mixed.

The upcoming catalyst is EIP-7918, which sets a fair floor price for data blobs. This will test the sustainability of the new fee market. The upgrade aims to restore normal pricing after the blob base fee was stuck at 1 wei, but its impact on rollup costs and overall network liquidity will be a critical test of Fusaka's long-term health.