On the 19th of September 2019 the Litecoin network saw another spike in transactions being sent, 48,582, according to data provided by bitinfocharts, breaking the prior yearly high on June 22 of 47,962.

It’s unclear what the underlying cause behind the anomalous spike is but based on other public data, it does not appear to be another dust attack per se. There has been an increase in usage in the few days prior that seem on initial glance to be fully legitimate.

Using Blockchair’s filters it looks like there have been a few suspect transactions in blocks 1704981, 1704984, 1705040, 1705035 and 1705021 to name but a few, which each contain transactions involving one input and 100s of outputs. These do not resemble typical dust attack transactions as the value in each output is too high at >0.01 LTC and they are not consistent. Without further tools to fully map and connect these addresses its hard to get a better picture of what is happening. At one point it appears to connect to an exchange / service wallet that has been used miltiple times during 2017–19.

There is also a connection to this wallet: (M893qmrU3PSwTrDVU7Cn3K4zxUWPKBmZkr) which appears to be constantly spamming the network with hundreds of transactions a day. Starting back in April of 2019 this wallet has executed over 167,820 transactions to date. Yet even this does not follow typical behaviour as the addresses involved appear to be controlled by the same owner constantly separating and consolidating funds. It is generating new addresses and filling them all with pennies. This is supported by another spike in the ‘sent from’ addresses correlating on the same day.

The daily value being sent however, has remained constant at around ~$350m daily, a hint that this has recently picked up pace enough to be noticed as such this anomoly is not indicative of greater growth on the network just yet.