- Ethereum miners seem to be spamming the project’s network with tens of thousands of small transactions.
- The reason for this is currently unknown, even though numerous theories have been proposed already.
- The number of daily transactions is already high due to stablecoin and DeFi usage, and it approaches its ATH.
Ethereum (ETH) has always been known for large numbers of transactions per day, mainly due to its numerous dApps. However, over the last several days, the project has been seeing a lot more activity than usual — even approaching its ATH in terms of transaction count.
There are several reasons for this, such as the increased use of stablecoins, as well as DeFi tokens. However, this is part of the project’s natural development. Another reason that ETH is seeing a strong surge in transactions, however, is the behavior of its miners, who apparently started spamming the network.
Ethereum spamming pushing transaction count to a new ATH
Ethereum’s ATH in terms of transactions per day was reached in early 2018, when it hit 1.35 million transactions in 24 hours. Now, however, the project’s transaction count climbed to 1.1 million, which is pretty much the closest it has been to its ATH since it hit this impressive milestone.
The information that miners are the ones spamming the network comes from Trustnodes. Trustnodes’ data shows that there were approximately 13,000 transactions in a single day that only sent $11.7, or around 0.05 ETH. Many contained even less than that.
Some of the mining pools that are known to be involved include Nanopool, as well as SparkPool, alongside others.
Ethereum spamming and gas prices
As mentioned, Ethereum already has quite a few transactions due to the DeFi and ETH version of the USDT stablecoin. Ethereum-based Tether is one of the biggest users of gas on the network.
In fact, miners started seeing this as an issue, which is why they recently had a vote aimed at increasing the gas limit. Currently, the limit sits at 10 million, while the miners wanted to take it up to 12.5 million. That way, more transactions will be able to get processed per second, which would speed things up a bit.
The vote was successful, and the increase has already started. Unfortunately, tens of thousands of new transactions, made by the miners themselves, have made this an insufficient increase, at least for now.
It is also worth noting that this is not the first case where the ETH network was spammed. The previous one took place in 2016, when Ethereum got hit by a DDoS attack. Back then, the only way out was to do a hard fork and push the gas cost higher. As for why the miners behave like this, there is no clear answer. Some speculate that they are trying to boost the fees. Whatever the reason, the move actually had some positive effect, as it managed to prevent some crypto stolen in hacking attacks from being processed.