Tether Blocks 370 Tron and Ethereum Wallets, Freezing $500 Million in USDT

▲ Tether Gold (XAUt)/AI-generated image

Tether has reportedly frozen over $514 million in USDT on the Tron and Ethereum networks over the past 30 days. This comes as the stablecoin issuer's wallet blocking measures, aimed at sanction evasion, fraud, and illicit fund flows, are expanding on a large scale.

Bitcoinist reported on the 9th, citing BlockSec data, that only 3.6% of Tether wallets placed on the block list in 2025 were subsequently unblocked. It is extremely rare for a frozen Tether blacklisted wallet to be normalized again, and more than half of the funds linked to these wallets were permanently burned through the contract's destroyBlackFunds function.

Over the past 30 days, Tether has frozen over $514 million in USDT across 370 addresses on the Ethereum and Tron networks. Of these, 328 addresses were on Tron, with approximately $506 million frozen. On Ethereum, 42 addresses and $8.73 million were frozen. The disparity between the two networks indicates that Tether's enforcement actions are intensifying, particularly on Tron.

The blocking speed is also accelerating. Throughout 2025, Tether blacklisted 4,163 addresses, freezing a total of $1.26 billion. If the current pace continues, the cumulative frozen amount this year could surpass last year's total even before December.

A broader investigation from 2023 to 2025 tallied the cumulative frozen amount at approximately $3.3 billion across 7,268 addresses. Bitcoinist reported that this figure significantly surpasses that of competing stablecoin issuer Circle during the same period.

Some of the recent large-scale freezing actions have been directly linked to government investigations. In April, Tether collaborated with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to freeze over $344 million in USDT held in two Tron addresses. Authorities stated that these wallets were connected to alleged Iran-related sanction evasion.

In February, Tether assisted authorities in seizing funds related to a "pig butchering" scam. The seizure at the time amounted to over $61 million. Tether previously disclosed that it had frozen approximately $4.2 billion in tokens linked to illicit activities over three years, with $3.5 billion of that amount locked since 2023, when cryptocurrency-related investigations intensified.

This expansion of freezing actions is also fueling debate surrounding the control over funds held by stablecoin issuers. Similar to cases where some DeFi projects halted or recovered funds through upgradable contracts and admin privileges after major hacks, the key issue has become who should exercise freezing authority and based on what criteria.

Stablecoins like USDT are directly controlled by their issuers in terms of issuance and burning. Bitcoinist reported that the freezing function is no longer an exceptional measure but has become a routine and large-scale enforcement tool in fraud, sanctions, and scam investigations.

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