Ethereum’s recent jump in onchain activity appears to be driven largely by scam-related transactions rather than organic growth, according to analysts at Citi.

The network has recorded a sharp rise in daily transactions and active addresses to record levels, but the increase does not point to sustainable expansion in real usage, the Wall Street bank said in a Thursday report.

“This type of transaction behavior is typically associated with ‘address poisoning’ scam campaigns,” analysts Alex Saunders and Vinh Vo wrote.

Citi’s analysis found that a significant portion of the new activity consists of transactions worth less than $1, a pattern more consistent with address-poisoning schemes than genuine user adoption. In such campaigns, malicious actors send small amounts of crypto from wallet addresses designed to resemble those frequently used by victims, increasing the risk of misdirected transfers.

Low transaction fees on Ethereum have reduced the cost of executing these attacks, allowing bad actors to generate large volumes of transactions that inflate headline network metrics without reflecting real demand, the analysts said.

The trend was also flagged this week by onchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov, who linked much of the activity spike to stablecoins. According to Sergeenkov, stablecoins account for roughly 80% of the unusual growth in new Ethereum addresses.

His research tracked USDT and USDC transfers below $1 and identified senders that distributed small amounts of stablecoins to at least 10,000 unique wallets. The largest of these were smart contracts that sent tiny transfers to hundreds of thousands of addresses, funded through functions that allow poisoning campaigns to be executed in large batches.

Despite the surge in onchain activity, ether’s price has lagged bitcoin over the same period. ETH has traded largely flat so far this year, while BTC has gained about 2.4%, though ether has slightly outperformed bitcoin over the past six months.

Citi noted that Ethereum’s activity spike contrasts with Bitcoin, where onchain usage has continued to drift modestly lower rather than accelerate. The divergence suggests Ethereum’s recent surge is a network-specific phenomenon driven by “malicious behavior,” not evidence of broader growth across the crypto market.

JPMorgan has also taken a cautious stance on Ethereum’s outlook. In a report published Wednesday, the bank said that while the network’s December Fusaka upgrade led to an immediate drop in fees alongside a jump in transactions and active addresses, it questioned whether the rebound would be sustained given competition from layer-2 networks and rival blockchains.