Tether Blacklists 39 ETH Addresses Worth Over $46 Million

Right after 100,000 in USDC were blacklisted by Centre as the cryptonews yesterday showed, we can see that Tether blacklists 46 million of USDT in Ethereum addresses. The stablecoin managed to blacklist 39 ETH addresses which were worth $46 million in USDT, 24 of which holding around 5.5 million USDT being blacklisted this year.

The revelation comes on the back of Centre and its first blacklisting of Ethereum address holding $100,000 in USDC which went viral yesterday. Anyways, one Ethereum researcher at Horizon Games named Philippe Castonguay used Dune Analytics to create a dashboard which tracks the number of addresses that were blacklisted by both Centre and Tether.

From here, we can see that the largest address that Tether blacklists holds over 4.5 million USDT and was blacklisted on April 5 this year.

Right now, the Tether news show that similar to the blacklisted addresses holding USDC, the Tether addresses which receive a blacklisting function are no longer able to transact with the cryptocurrency, freezing any coins held in its address.

According to the general counsel at Bitfinex (which is a sister company of Tether) named Stuard Hoegner, the media that Tether works with international law enforcement agencies and blaclists addresses whenever required.

“Tether routinely assists law enforcement in their investigations… Through the freeze address feature, Tether has been able to help users and exchanges to save and recover tens of millions of dollars stolen from them by hackers.”

Tether now freezes all of these amounts and reactions are coming in the social media world. The CIO of Arcane Assets, Eric Wall, took to Twitter to say that the most recent freeze occurred on June 14, which held 939,000 USDT which were received from Binance around 22 hours before the blacklisting occurred.

Most other freezes seem to have been made on Ethereum accounts either for precautionary reasons (possibly identified as scams/ponzis) or in error/to protect others from making errors (like freezing 0x000…0001). 3 addresses were unfrozen after the freeze.

— Eric Wall (@ercwl) July 9, 2020

Wall also added that most other freezes were purely precautionary actions:

“Most other freezes seem to have been made on Ethereum accounts either for  precautionary reasons (possibly identified as scams/Ponzis) or in error/to protect others from making errors (like freezing  0x000…0001). 3 addresses were unfrozen after the freeze.”

All of these developments add to the distrust that central organizations have within the crypto world – and resistance is specifically over stablecoins and their ability to be censored.