Ethereum is currently reporting the highest daily network growth in its history, a statistical surge that ostensibly signals a massive return of user activity. Ethereum is currently reporting the highest daily network growth in its history, a statistical surge that ostensibly signals a massive return of user activity.

Ethereum transactions hit record highs because of cheap gas fees – because of this massive scam

Ethereum is currently reporting the highest daily network growth in its history, a statistical surge that ostensibly signals a massive return of user activity.

Over the past week, the Ethereum mainnet processed 2.9 million transactions, a new all-time high according to Token Terminal data.

This activity was accompanied by a sharp jump in daily active addresses, which rose to approximately 1.3 million from roughly 0.6 million in late December.

Critically, this explosion in throughput has occurred while transaction costs have remained negligible. Average transaction fees have stayed in the “pennies” range of $0.10 to $0.20 despite the record demand.

Ethereum's Onchain ActivityEthereum's Onchain Activity (Source: Token Terminal)

For a network that historically saw fees spike between $50 and $200 during the 2021-2022 NFT boom, this represented a fundamental shift in economic accessibility.

However, forensic analysis suggests this growth is not entirely organic. While surface metrics indicate a bull-market revival, security researchers warn that a significant portion of this traffic is driven by malicious actors.

These attackers are exploiting the network's newly lowered fees to launch industrial-scale “address poisoning” campaigns, targeting users with automated scams disguised as legitimate activity.

The scaling context

To understand the sudden spike in volume, one must look at the recent structural changes to the Ethereum protocol. For years, the network was powerful but economically unusable for most people.

Leon Waidmann, head of research at the Onchain Foundation, pointed out that since he entered crypto, Ethereum mainnet fees were simply too high for the average user.

He noted the network was too expensive for retail, too expensive for frequent usage, and too expensive to build consumer-scale apps.

However, that changed about one year ago when Ethereum developers methodically scaled the network while attempting to protect decentralization and security.

This led to three major protocol upgrades that advanced the roadmap.

The first was the May 2025 “Pectra” upgrade, which increased blob capacity by raising the target blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the max from 6 to 9. This effectively doubled expected blob throughput.

Then, the network's “Fusaka” upgrade followed in December 2025, shipping Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). This allowed validators to verify blob availability via sampling rather than downloading the entire dataset, enabling higher throughput while keeping node requirements reasonable.

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Most recently, the Blob Parameter-Only (BPO) fork in January 2026 raised the blob target from 10 to 14 and the max to 21. These pragmatic updates were designed to unlock significant capacity for the blockchain network.

The economic effects of these upgrades became apparent quickly as the network's mainnet fees dropped sharply, and simple transactions became cheap again.

Waidmann pointed out that building directly on Layer 1 became viable at scale, prompting prediction markets, real-world assets, and payments to move back to the mainnet.

At the same time, stablecoin transfers on the network reached approximately $8 trillion in the fourth quarter.

Ethereum's record activity is not adding value

While the record activity shows signs of a blockchain in the ascendancy, on-chain data suggest that these activities have not added real value to the network.

Data from Alhpractal shows that the Metcalfe Ratio, which compares market capitalization to the square of the number of active users, is declining. This indicates that valuation is not keeping pace with real network adoption.

Ethereum Adoption Ethereum's Metacalfe Ratio (Source: Alphractal)

Additionally, Ethereum's Adoption Score is currently at level 1, the lowest tier in its historical range. This reflects a cold market, with valuation relative to on-chain activity low.

Considering this, Matthias Seidl, the co-founder of GrowThePie, suggested that the network's activity increase might not be organic.

He cited the example of a single address receiving 190,000 native ETH transfers from 190,000 unique wallets in a single day.

Seidl noted the number of wallets receiving native transfers is relatively stable, but the number of wallets sending native transfers increased a lot (2x). He highlighted that many native transfers (sending vanilla ETH) use only 21,000 gas, the cheapest form of EVM transaction.

Ethereum EVM Transaction CostEthereum EVM Transaction Cost (Source: GrowThePie)

These are currently accounting for almost 50% of all transactions. In comparison, sending an ERC20 token costs roughly 65,000 gas, and one stablecoin transfer needs as much gas as three native ETH transfers.

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Address poisoning?

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s latest burst of on-chain activity is being traced to an old scam, repackaged for a cheaper-fee era.

Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov noted that a wave of address-poisoning campaigns has been exploiting low gas costs since December, inflating network metrics while seeding transaction histories with lookalike addresses designed to trick users into sending real funds to attackers.

The mechanics of these attacks are simple: scammers generate “poisoning” addresses that resemble a target’s legitimate wallet address by matching the first and last characters. After a victim completes a normal transfer, the attacker sends a small “dust” transaction to the victim so the spoofed address appears in their recent history.

The bet is that, at some later point, the user will copy the familiar-looking address from their activity feed without verifying the full string.

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Considering this, Sergeenkov ties the surge in new Ethereum addresses to that playbook. He estimates new address creation ran about 2.7 times the 2025 average, with the week of Jan. 12 peaking at roughly 2.7 million new addresses.

Address Poisoning VictimsAddress Poisoning Victims (Source: Andrey Sergeenkov)

When he decomposed the flows behind the growth, he concluded that roughly 80% was driven by stablecoin activity rather than organic user demand.

To test whether this looked like poisoning, Sergeenkov looked for a telltale signature: addresses that received a sub-$1 stablecoin transfer as their first interaction.

By his count, 67% of the new addresses fit that pattern. In absolute terms, he found 3.86 million out of 5.78 million addresses received “dust” as their first stablecoin transaction.

He then narrowed the search to the senders: accounts moving less than $1 of USDT and USDC between Dec. 15, 2025, and Jan. 18, 2026.

Sergeenkov counted unique recipients for each sender and filtered for those distributing to at least 10,000 addresses. What surfaced, he says, were smart contracts designed to industrialize the campaign. These are codes that can bankroll and coordinate hundreds of poisoning addresses in a single transaction.

One contract he reviewed included a function labeled `fundPoisoners`, which, in his description, disperses stablecoin dust and a small amount of ETH for gas to a large batch of poisoning addresses at once.

Those addresses then fan out, sending dust to millions of potential targets to manufacture misleading entries in wallet transaction histories.

The model relies on scale as most recipients will never fall for it, but the economics work if a tiny fraction do.

Sergeenkov pegs the effective conversion rate at around 0.01%, implying the business is built to tolerate extreme failure rates. In the dataset he analyzed, 116 victims collectively lost about $740,000, with one loss accounting for $509,000 of that total.

The gating factor has historically been cost. Address poisoning demands millions of on-chain transactions that do not directly generate revenue unless a victim mis-sends funds.

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Sergeenkov argues that, until late 2025, Ethereum network fees made the mass-send strategy harder to justify. However, with transaction costs roughly six-fold lower, the risk-reward calculus shifted sharply in favor of the attacker.

Considering this, Sergeenkov argued that scaling Ethereum throughput without hardening its user-facing safety has created an environment where “record” activity can be indistinguishable from automated abuse.

In his view, the industry’s obsession with headline network metrics risks masking a darker reality in which cheaper blockspace can easily subsidize mass-targeted scams as legitimate adoption, leaving retail users to bear the loss.

The post Ethereum transactions hit record highs because of cheap gas fees – because of this massive scam appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API

Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API

Turn lengthy earnings call transcripts into one-page insights using the Financial Modeling Prep APIPhoto by Bich Tran Earnings calls are packed with insights. They tell you how a company performed, what management expects in the future, and what analysts are worried about. The challenge is that these transcripts often stretch across dozens of pages, making it tough to separate the key takeaways from the noise. With the right tools, you don’t need to spend hours reading every line. By combining the Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) API with Groq’s lightning-fast LLMs, you can transform any earnings call into a concise summary in seconds. The FMP API provides reliable access to complete transcripts, while Groq handles the heavy lifting of distilling them into clear, actionable highlights. In this article, we’ll build a Python workflow that brings these two together. You’ll see how to fetch transcripts for any stock, prepare the text, and instantly generate a one-page summary. Whether you’re tracking Apple, NVIDIA, or your favorite growth stock, the process works the same — fast, accurate, and ready whenever you are. Fetching Earnings Transcripts with FMP API The first step is to pull the raw transcript data. FMP makes this simple with dedicated endpoints for earnings calls. If you want the latest transcripts across the market, you can use the stable endpoint /stable/earning-call-transcript-latest. For a specific stock, the v3 endpoint lets you request transcripts by symbol, quarter, and year using the pattern: https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={q}&year={y}&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY here’s how you can fetch NVIDIA’s transcript for a given quarter: import requestsAPI_KEY = "your_api_key"symbol = "NVDA"quarter = 2year = 2024url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={API_KEY}"response = requests.get(url)data = response.json()# Inspect the keysprint(data.keys())# Access transcript contentif "content" in data[0]: transcript_text = data[0]["content"] print(transcript_text[:500]) # preview first 500 characters The response typically includes details like the company symbol, quarter, year, and the full transcript text. If you aren’t sure which quarter to query, the “latest transcripts” endpoint is the quickest way to always stay up to date. Cleaning and Preparing Transcript Data Raw transcripts from the API often include long paragraphs, speaker tags, and formatting artifacts. Before sending them to an LLM, it helps to organize the text into a cleaner structure. Most transcripts follow a pattern: prepared remarks from executives first, followed by a Q&A session with analysts. Separating these sections gives better control when prompting the model. In Python, you can parse the transcript and strip out unnecessary characters. A simple way is to split by markers such as “Operator” or “Question-and-Answer.” Once separated, you can create two blocks — Prepared Remarks and Q&A — that will later be summarized independently. This ensures the model handles each section within context and avoids missing important details. Here’s a small example of how you might start preparing the data: import re# Example: using the transcript_text we fetched earliertext = transcript_text# Remove extra spaces and line breaksclean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip()# Split sections (this is a heuristic; real-world transcripts vary slightly)if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1)else: prepared, qna = clean_text, ""print("Prepared Remarks Preview:\n", prepared[:500])print("\nQ&A Preview:\n", qna[:500]) With the transcript cleaned and divided, you’re ready to feed it into Groq’s LLM. Chunking may be necessary if the text is very long. A good approach is to break it into segments of a few thousand tokens, summarize each part, and then merge the summaries in a final pass. Summarizing with Groq LLM Now that the transcript is clean and split into Prepared Remarks and Q&A, we’ll use Groq to generate a crisp one-pager. The idea is simple: summarize each section separately (for focus and accuracy), then synthesize a final brief. Prompt design (concise and factual) Use a short, repeatable template that pushes for neutral, investor-ready language: You are an equity research analyst. Summarize the following earnings call sectionfor {symbol} ({quarter} {year}). Be factual and concise.Return:1) TL;DR (3–5 bullets)2) Results vs. guidance (what improved/worsened)3) Forward outlook (specific statements)4) Risks / watch-outs5) Q&A takeaways (if present)Text:<<<{section_text}>>> Python: calling Groq and getting a clean summary Groq provides an OpenAI-compatible API. Set your GROQ_API_KEY and pick a fast, high-quality model (e.g., a Llama-3.1 70B variant). We’ll write a helper to summarize any text block, then run it for both sections and merge. import osimport textwrapimport requestsGROQ_API_KEY = os.environ.get("GROQ_API_KEY") or "your_groq_api_key"GROQ_BASE_URL = "https://api.groq.com/openai/v1" # OpenAI-compatibleMODEL = "llama-3.1-70b" # choose your preferred Groq modeldef call_groq(prompt, temperature=0.2, max_tokens=1200): url = f"{GROQ_BASE_URL}/chat/completions" headers = { "Authorization": f"Bearer {GROQ_API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json", } payload = { "model": MODEL, "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a precise, neutral equity research analyst."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}, ], "temperature": temperature, "max_tokens": max_tokens, } r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload, timeout=60) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"].strip()def build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year): template = """ You are an equity research analyst. Summarize the following earnings call section for {symbol} ({quarter} {year}). Be factual and concise. Return: 1) TL;DR (3–5 bullets) 2) Results vs. guidance (what improved/worsened) 3) Forward outlook (specific statements) 4) Risks / watch-outs 5) Q&A takeaways (if present) Text: <<< {section_text} >>> """ return textwrap.dedent(template).format( symbol=symbol, quarter=quarter, year=year, section_text=section_text )def summarize_section(section_text, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024"): if not section_text or section_text.strip() == "": return "(No content found for this section.)" prompt = build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year) return call_groq(prompt)# Example usage with the cleaned splits from Section 3prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")final_one_pager = f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks — Key Points{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()print(final_one_pager[:1200]) # preview Tips that keep quality high: Keep temperature low (≈0.2) for factual tone. If a section is extremely long, chunk at ~5–8k tokens, summarize each chunk with the same prompt, then ask the model to merge chunk summaries into one section summary before producing the final one-pager. If you also fetched headline numbers (EPS/revenue, guidance) earlier, prepend them to the prompt as brief context to help the model anchor on the right outcomes. Building the End-to-End Pipeline At this point, we have all the building blocks: the FMP API to fetch transcripts, a cleaning step to structure the data, and Groq LLM to generate concise summaries. The final step is to connect everything into a single workflow that can take any ticker and return a one-page earnings call summary. The flow looks like this: Input a stock ticker (for example, NVDA). Use FMP to fetch the latest transcript. Clean and split the text into Prepared Remarks and Q&A. Send each section to Groq for summarization. Merge the outputs into a neatly formatted earnings one-pager. Here’s how it comes together in Python: def summarize_earnings_call(symbol, quarter, year, api_key, groq_key): # Step 1: Fetch transcript from FMP url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={api_key}" resp = requests.get(url) resp.raise_for_status() data = resp.json() if not data or "content" not in data[0]: return f"No transcript found for {symbol} {quarter} {year}" text = data[0]["content"] # Step 2: Clean and split clean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip() if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1) else: prepared, qna = clean_text, "" # Step 3: Summarize with Groq prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol, quarter, year) qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol, quarter, year) # Step 4: Merge into final one-pager return f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()# Example runprint(summarize_earnings_call("NVDA", 2, 2024, API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY)) With this setup, generating a summary becomes as simple as calling one function with a ticker and date. You can run it inside a notebook, integrate it into a research workflow, or even schedule it to trigger after each new earnings release. Free Stock Market API and Financial Statements API... Conclusion Earnings calls no longer need to feel overwhelming. With the Financial Modeling Prep API, you can instantly access any company’s transcript, and with Groq LLM, you can turn that raw text into a sharp, actionable summary in seconds. This pipeline saves hours of reading and ensures you never miss the key results, guidance, or risks hidden in lengthy remarks. Whether you track tech giants like NVIDIA or smaller growth stocks, the process is the same — fast, reliable, and powered by the flexibility of FMP’s data. Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story
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Medium2025/09/18 14:40