Ethereum Mainnet Activity Surges, But Is It Real?

Ethereum has seen a surge in daily active addresses, surpassing popular scaling networks like Arbitrum and Base. The number of daily active addresses on Ethereum climbed towards 1 million earlier this month, briefly peaking above 1.3 million on January 16 before settling closer to 950,000, according to data source Token Terminal.

This rebound follows the Fusaka upgrade in December, which sharply reduced transaction fees and made it cheaper to transact directly on Ethereum again. Lower costs have helped revive on-chain activity, particularly for stablecoins, which remain the dominant use case for day-to-day transfers.

However, analysts caution that raw address counts can be misleading, especially when fees fall far enough to make spam economical. Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov found that a significant portion of January's address growth is tied to address poisoning attacks rather than organic adoption.