TL;DR
- Fusaka payment discount triggers explosion in handle poisoning assaults.
- Attackers ship tens of millions of mud transactions at negligible price.
- Every day transactions leap from 30,000 to 167,000 after the improve.
The discount in gasoline charges on Ethereum following the Fusaka improve in December 2025 generated an unintended aspect impact: an exponential enhance in handle poisoning assaults. What was meant to enhance community accessibility ended up changing into a breeding floor for scammers who can now ship tens of millions of mud transactions at negligible price.
Leon Waidmann, head of analysis at Lisk, highlighted the present paradox on X. Stablecoin quantity reached $7.5 trillion in a single quarter, whereas transaction charges remained under one greenback. “File utilization. File low cost. On the similar time,” he wrote, pointing to the biggest divergence between fundamentals and value within the crypto ecosystem.
Blockchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov printed a examine revealing how handle poisoning assaults skyrocketed after Fusaka. The improve decreased gasoline charges sixfold, making operations low cost sufficient to scale these kind of fraud.
Thousands and thousands in Losses Inside Simply Two Months
The handle poisoning mechanism includes sending small transfers from addresses that mimic the sufferer’s common contacts. If the consumer copies the flawed handle from their historical past for a subsequent transaction, funds find yourself in attackers’ palms. Sergeenkov describes the observe as a lottery: scammers ship tens of millions of low-cost transactions hoping for just a few giant payoffs.
Earlier than Fusaka, attackers despatched roughly 30,000 mud transactions per day, based on Sergeenkov’s evaluation of 101 tokens between September 2025 and February 2026. After the improve, the determine jumped to 167,000 each day, with a peak of 510,000 on a single day in January.
The financial penalties are telling. In simply over two months after Fusaka, victims misplaced greater than $63 million. That determine multiplies by 13 the $4.9 million stolen in a comparable interval earlier than the improve.
A single switch, which occurred on December 19, 2025, concentrated a big portion of the losses by stealing $50 million in USDT. Even excluding that case, thefts reached $13.3 million, 2.7 instances greater than within the earlier interval.
Sergeenkov criticized the prioritization of progress over safety: “There’s nothing flawed with decreasing charges, however the safety issues that low cost transactions amplify ought to have been addressed earlier than the improve. When the Ethereum Basis claims it’s constructing trillion-dollar safety, consumer security have to be the strictest precedence over progress metrics.“
