Tether to cap $500M in USDT in 30 days, Blocksec data shows
Data from BlockSec's USDT Freeze Tracker shows that Tether has frozen more than $514 million in USDT in Ethereum and Tron over the past 30 days.
As of Friday, the device blacklisted 370 addresses during that period, 328 on Tron and 42 on Ethereum, with about $505.9 million tied up in Tron and $8.73 million in Ethereum.
The figures indicate that recent enforcement activity has focused on Tron, and shows how often the world's largest stablecoin issuer intervenes on-chain to move high-risk or investigative funds.
Recent activity also builds on the ever-increasing enforcement pattern. BlockSec's 2025 data analysis shows that Tether has blacklisted 4,163 unique addresses across Ethereum and Tron, freezing a total of $1.26 billion USD. The current rate of freezing suggests that Tether may surpass that sum in blacklisted USDT before the end of the year.
In the year More than half of the $1.26 billion in blocked assets in 2025 (about $698 million) were destroyed by “BlackFunds'” destructive practices, and only 3.6 percent of those addresses were removed from the blacklist, indicating that once imposed freezes are rarely reversed.
In 2026, Tether blacklisting activity will increase rapidly
A separate study of 2023-2025 trends estimated that Tether would have moved about $3.3 billion across 7,268 addresses in those three years, more than rival stablecoin Circle over the same horizon.
USDT Freeze Tracker. Source: BlockSec
Tether has released a large sum of money and outlined some of the issues behind them. In February, the company said it had frozen about $4.2 billion in tokens over three years linked to illegal activity, with about $3.5 billion locked up starting in 2023 as authorities step up efforts to crack down on crypto-related crimes.
In April, Teter said he worked with the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and law enforcement agencies to freeze more than $344 million at two Tron addresses they said were linked to suspected sanctions on Iran.
Related: Tether reports $1.04B profit in Q1 as Treasury holdings hit $141B
Stablecoin sparks widening debate over blockchain
The ever-increasing number of blacklists and related attacks has fueled a wide-ranging debate over how far crypto issuers and protocols should go to stop suspicious flows.
Some projects in decentralized finance, for example, have used flexible terms and administrative controls to freeze or claw back funds in cases of large-scale exploitation, raising questions about who decides when powers are used.
In stablecoins, where issuers such as Tether retain direct control over the methods of pouring and burning, onchain data and enforcement statements show that blacklisting and blocking are now routinely used in fraud, blocking and fraud investigations.
Tether and the Tron network did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph's request for comment.
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