Tether froze more than $514M in USDT across Ethereum and Tron addresses over the past 30 days, BlockSec said.
Tether froze more than $514 million in USDT across 370 addresses on Ethereum and Tron over the past 30 days, according to on-chain data from BlockSec's USDT Freeze Tracker.
Of those addresses, 328 were on Tron and 42 on Ethereum. Tron accounted for approximately $505.9 million of the frozen funds, while Ethereum accounted for $8.73 million. The concentration on Tron reflects where the bulk of recent enforcement activity has occurred.
BlockSec's analysis of 2025 activity found that Tether blacklisted 4,163 unique addresses across both chains, freezing a combined $1.26 billion in USDT. More than half of those frozen funds, approximately $698 million, were later destroyed using the contracts' "destroyBlackFunds" function. Only 3.6% of blacklisted addresses were subsequently removed, indicating that freezes are rarely reversed once applied.
A separate study by AMLBot covering 2023 through 2025 estimated that Tether immobilized roughly $3.3 billion across 7,268 addresses during that period, far exceeding the volume frozen by rival stablecoin issuer Circle over the same timeframe.
Tether disclosed in February that it had frozen approximately $4.2 billion in tokens over three years due to links to illicit activity, with $3.5 billion of that total locked since 2023. In April, Tether worked with the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and law enforcement agencies to freeze $344 million in USDT across two Tron addresses linked to suspected sanctions evasion, while in February, Tether assisted authorities in seizing over $61 million in USDT tied to pig butchering scams.
The current pace of blacklisting activity suggests Tether could surpass last year's total blacklisted USDT volume before the end of 2026. The growing frequency of freezes has prompted debate within the industry over how much intervention crypto issuers should exercise over on-chain fund flows.
In decentralized finance, some protocols have used upgradeable contracts and admin controls to halt or recover funds following exploits, raising questions about the limits of such authority. For centralized stablecoin issuers such as Tether, which retain direct control over minting and burning, on-chain data shows that blacklisting is now a routine tool in fraud, sanctions, and scam investigations. Tether and the Tron network did not respond to requests for comment.
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