$3 Million Worth Tether USD (USDT) Account Has Just Been Frozen, What’s Going On?

According to Whale Alert, another address on the TRON network was frozen today, containing USDT worth 2.85 million. This is the fifth freeze since the beginning of the year, with the previous one occurring in late February, when an account containing USD 1.04 million was blacklisted. In total, since the beginning of 2023, five addresses have been frozen, for a total of 11.44 million USDT.

Recall that, as a centralized company, Tether can blacklist addresses that have been involved in crimes such as money laundering. Tether has been freezing stablecoin crypto addresses since 2017 at the request of financial regulators and law enforcement agencies. According to various sources, the company blacklisted more than 820 addresses with a combined value of more than half a billion dollars.

An extraordinary case of account freezing by Tether occurred in November 2022, when the wallet of the infamous FTX exchange was blacklisted, containing 46.36 million USDT on the TRON network. The reason for the address freeze then was the sale of USDT by the exchange and its affiliated firms, in the course of which the stablecoin’s peg to the dollar was disrupted.

Despite growing outrage over such actions that run counter to the true meaning of cryptocurrencies, Tether continues to gain ground. Since the start of the year, USDT has already added $5.5 billion in capitalization, while its nearest rivals USDC and BUSD have lost $1.1 billion and $8.1 billion, respectively.