Crypto: Stablecoin ‘dust’ Txs On Ethereum Triple Post-fusaka: Coin Metrics

Analysis of 227 million USDC and USDT balance updates found that 43% were dust transfers under $1, said Coin Metrics.

Stablecoin-fueled dusting attacks are now estimated to make up 11% of all Ethereum transactions and 26% of active addresses on an average day, after the Fusaka upgrade made transactions cheaper, according to Coin Metrics.

Ethereum is now seeing more than 2 million average daily transactions, spiking to almost 2.9 million in mid-January, along with 1.4 million daily active addresses — a 60% increase over prior averages.

The Fusaka upgrade in December made using the network cheaper and easier by improving onchain data handling, reducing the cost of posting information from layer-2 networks back to Ethereum.

Coin Metrics said it analyzed over 227 million balance updates for USDC (USDC) and USDt (USDT) on Ethereum from November 2025 through January 2026.

It found that 43% were involved in transfers of less than $1 and 38% were under a single penny — “amounts with insignificant economic purpose other than wallet seeding.”

Pre-Fusaka, stablecoin dust accounted for roughly 3 to 5% of Ethereum transactions and 15 to 20% of active addresses, it said.

However, the remaining 57% of balance updates involved transfers above $1, “suggesting the majority of stablecoin activity remains organic,” Coin Metrics stated.

In January, security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov pointed to a 170% increase in new wallet addresses in the week starting Jan. 12, and also suggested it was linked to a wave of address poisoning attacks taking advantage of low gas fees.

These “dusting” attacks typically involve malicious actors sending fractions of a cent worth of a stablecoin from wallet addresses that resemble legitimate ones, duping users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.

Source: CoinTelegraph