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The ERC-20 leaderboard has a Unicode lookalike problem

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

The per-contract ERC-20 transfer leaderboard looks sane for about three rows. USDT is first, USDC is second, WETH is third, and then individual tokens whose names look like USDT, USDC, and ETH start showing up. Aggregated as a family, those lookalikes belong above WETH.

From June 17 through June 23 UTC, 19 Unicode lookalike contracts in the top-50 ERC-20 event sources emitted 4,858,242 unique Transfer logs. Real USDC emitted 4,929,166. The lookalikes got almost the same event count from 47,703 transactions, while USDC needed 1,596,999 transactions.

The ERC-721 leaderboard had a mirror-token problem

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

The top ERC-721 transfer source last week was not a mint everyone suddenly cared about. It was a mirror contract.

From June 17 through June 23 UTC, ORE404Mirror emitted 273,448 unique ERC-721 Transfer logs from 740 transactions. That made it the busiest ERC-721 event source in Xatu's new execution tables, more than 7x the next contract by deduped event count. The awkward part is that the verified source says exactly what it is: contract ORE404Mirror is DN404Mirror.

Every transaction reads the fee recipient

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Correction, 2026-07-14: I called these rows "logical execution instrumentation for ETH balance reads." The count was right, but the noun was wrong. Xatu gets this table from Cryo's projection of Geth's prestateTracer, so each row is a transaction-account prestate record, not a BALANCE opcode or repeated-read counter. The fee-recipient one-row-per-transaction result survives. I wrote up the correction here.

USDT was not the hottest address in the balance-read table.

I expected the usual suspects: USDT, USDC, WETH, routers, precompiles, some unlabeled contract that every block touches. They are all there. But the biggest line in the one-day sample was a builder fee recipient, because the execution path records a balance read against the block author once per transaction.

That sounds obvious after you see it. It was not obvious from the table name.