Centralized Finance (CeFi) organization and leading USD stablecoin issuer, Tether, has frozen the funds attached to three Ethereum addresses with a value of over $150 million of USDT stablecoin These addresses were amongst the first in 2022 that were added to the blacklist by Tether.
Tether has been known to blacklist addresses that it believes belong to criminals of different types. Discretion as to which address to freeze lies at the discretion of the company.
Last year, Tether blacklisted 312 addresses, and since it began this process in 2017, it has frozen over five hundred addresses. The company is yet to release an announcement or Press Release concerning the reason behind the recent blacklisting. Precedence has shown that the incident may have occurred to freeze the addresses of those involved in cyber attacks.
When a Kucoin hack occurred in 2020, Tether blacklisted over $35 million USDT, which stopped the hackers from benefiting from the loot. Another reason that Tether has given for blacklisting addresses in the past is a precautionary reason, where they are frozen because the addresses have been associated with a scam.
The ability of Tether to freeze addresses and not give reasons has increased the calls for decentralized options. This has turned attention to a decentralized alternative, TerraUSD (UST), a stablecoin from the Terra network. However, for now, TerraUSDT’s market cap of $10.6 billion is pale compared with the market cap of USDT, which is $78.5 billion.
