Ethereum mainnet saw daily active addresses spike to roughly 1.3 million, before activity cooled and stabilized near 945,000, based on Intellectia AI’s tracking. The jump coincided with a sharp drop in transaction fees to around $0.15, which materially improved the cost calculus for using Layer 1 again.
Security researchers, however, cautioned that the headline surge was not a pure demand story. A meaningful slice of the address growth appears tied to address-poisoning and dusting campaigns that become cheaper and easier to run when fees compress, which can distort how desks and analysts interpret “active users.”
🪃⛓️ Return to Mainnet@ethereum L1 outranks all leading L2s in terms of daily active addresses.
Interesting. pic.twitter.com/Nk7O5adWA5
— Token Terminal 📊 (@tokenterminal) January 22, 2026
Why activity spiked
Lower fees following the recent upgrade made mainnet transactions notably cheaper, encouraging users and applications to move activity back to L1 or test workflows directly on mainnet. The Jan. 16 peak also exceeded the combined daily activity of several major Layer-2s cited in monitoring coverage, including Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, signaling a short-term behavioral rotation.
Industry commentary described the move as a “return to mainnet,” reflecting both organic re-engagement and cost-driven experimentation. In practice, reduced fees lower the friction for everything—legitimate transfers, application activity, and opportunistic probing—so the raw count needs context.
Where the data gets noisy
Researchers flagged address-poisoning and dusting as contributors to the elevated address count. These tactics rely on many small, low-value transactions that are inexpensive to send when fees are depressed. That dynamic can inflate daily active address metrics and mislead growth models unless teams filter out spam-like patterns and low-signal micro-transactions.
At the same time, Ethereum’s strategic role remains underpinned by its position as a major hub for tokenized assets, with on-chain assets cited above $400 billion and long-range forecasts pointing to tokenization growth through 2030. That context matters because activity can rotate between L1 and L2 without necessarily changing Ethereum’s longer-term relevance to settlement and tokenized market plumbing.
What desks and teams should take from this
Lower fees can improve execution economics for treasuries, arbitrageurs, and operational transfers, at least tactically. But the same fee compression increases the ROI for nuisance activity, so security and analytics teams need to treat sudden address spikes as a metric-quality problem first, not a growth victory.
From an operating standpoint, the practical priorities are clear: active-address analytics should be adjusted for poisoning and dusting noise, liquidity and activity should be tracked across L1 and L2 as a single rotating system, and wallet/security monitoring should tighten detection rules when fees fall sharply.
Whether this “mainnet rebound” persists will hinge on two variables: fee durability and measurement hygiene. If low costs remain in place and detection improves, mainnet activity can stay structurally higher; if not, the headline address figures will remain unreliable as a signal for real user growth.
