Another address on the TRON network was frozen today containing $2.85 million worth of USDT, Whale Alert reported. This is the fifth freeze since the beginning of the year, the previous freeze occurred in late February when an account containing $1.04 million was blacklisted. Since the beginning of 2023, a total of 5 addresses have been frozen, totaling $11.44 million.
Recall that, as a centralized company, Tether can blacklist addresses involved in crimes such as money laundering. Tether has been freezing stablecoin cryptocurrency 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 $5 billion.
A special case of Tether freezing accounts occurred in November 2022, when the wallet of the notorious FTX exchange was blacklisted, with $46.36 million on the Tron network. The reason for the address freeze at the time was that the exchange and its affiliates sold USDT, disrupting the stablecoin’s peg to the U.S. dollar in the process.
Tether continues to make progress despite growing outrage over this breach of what cryptocurrency really is. USDT has added $5.5 billion in capital since the start of the year, while its closest competitors USDC and BUSD have lost $1.1 billion and $8.1 billion, respectively.