This must be carefully coordinated with partners, but we continue to progress towards readiness for it. We can’t change a PoW before there is software to mine on the new PoW and pools are ready to allow mining with the new PoW. Also, this require a hard fork, and hard forks should always be done with care.
They appear to be stopped for the moment. We are working with partners at Exchanges and in the mining community to mitigate the attacks.
It’s not spam and not related to this attack.
It is likely a large organization cleaning up “dust.” Many tiny Bitcoin transaction UTXOs accumulated over time, long before the Bitcoin Gold fork. When BTC transaction costs were high, they were ignored because the cost of combining them was high.
On the BTG chain, transactions are currently inexpensive, so they are combining these small UTXOs into wallets to make their funds more usable. We go through periods with these kinds of small transactions from time to time as people clean up old holdings.
For example, this might be done by an Exchange preparing to list BTG or to allow access to forked coins from previously held BTC.