Dusting Attack

A dusting attack occurs when a tiny amount of cryptocurrency, commonly referred to as dust, is deliberately sent to thousands, and sometimes even hundreds of thousands, of wallet addresses. This attack is deployed with the intention of tracing these addresses in hopes of “unmasking” or de-anonymizing them. Mass dustings may also serve as stress tests, where a large volume of dust is rapidly sent to evaluate the throughput or bandwidth of a network. Some argue that these dustings are a means to spam a network by inundating it with numerous insignificant transactions that temporarily congest or slow down its operations.