39 Ethereum addresses banned by Tether. Tether has blacklisted 39 Ethereum addresses, with millions of dollars in USDT. Valued at more than $ 46 million.
Tether, a renowned stablecoin issuer, has blacklisted 39 Ethereum addresses, valued at more than $ 46 million. For their part, 24 of these addresses were revealed to have around 5.5 million Tether (USDT).
To start, a report revealed this news on July 9, noting that the firm banned 24 of the accounts this year. Similarly, Tether began prohibiting these addresses as of November 17, 2017.
Importantly, this news about Ethereum’s 39-address blacklist came to light after Philippe Castonguay , Ethereum researcher at Horizon, used Dune Analysis . With the intention of creating a board that would track the addresses of the much-named, blacklist.
Turns out 39 addresses have been banned from using USDT on Ethereum as of now. Made another dashboard to keep track of USDT bans here:https://t.co/uuQd1kW28Y https://t.co/sUAw5hnWur pic.twitter.com/72G7OKNlfI
— Philippe Castonguay (@PhABCD) July 9, 2020
Notably, the news comes just a day after CENTER was known to have frozen an address with $ 100,000 in USDC tokens.
39 Ethereum addresses banned by Tether
As a result of all the USDT addresses blacklisted, they are now unable to transact with Tether. Along with this, all currencies already in those directions have been frozen by the company.
As a result, Stuart Hoegner, a Bitfinex attorney, has said that Tether works alongside many law enforcement agencies and watches all directions. This is why you blacklist all the addresses you deem inappropriate.
Commenting on this, Stuart Hoegner reported :
“Through the address freeze feature, Tether has been able to help users save tens of millions of dollars, stolen by hackers.”
He also stressed that: ” Tether works jointly with international authorities and makes the decision to freeze certain funds, when required .”
In addition to this, when an address is blacklisted, it results in you not being able to send, receive, or exchange USDT. So the tokens stored at these addresses are basically unusable.
The blacklist
Hinting at Tether’s blacklist, Eric Wall , CIO of Arcane Assets, took to Twitter to say that the most recent freeze occurred on June 14, which contained $ 939,000. It should be emphasized that they were received from Binance , around 22 hours before the blacklist occurred.
Most other freezes seem to have been made on Ethereum accounts either for precautionary reasons (possibly identified as scams/ponzis) or in error/to protect others from making errors (like freezing 0x000…0001). 3 addresses were unfrozen after the freeze.
— Eric Wall (@ercwl) July 9, 2020
Most of the other freezes appear to have been done on Ethereum accounts, either for precautionary reasons (possibly identified as scams) or by mistake. In order to protect others from making mistakes (such as freezing 0x000… 0001).
Certainly, on Tether’s blacklist, 3 addresses were thawed after the freeze. It was later corrected, noting that the bans were lifted from four directions, rather than three.
While the use of fraudulently blacklisted addresses could help improve security in the crypto space. This measure has increased mistrust in central organizations.
Application of the law
The CENTER Consortium, the entity that issues the USDC stablecoin, admitted that it blocked that particular address, in response to a request for law enforcement.
A company spokesperson said :
“CENTER, you can confirm that an address was blacklisted in response to a police request.”
He also added: ” While we cannot comment on the details of the law enforcement requests, CENTER complies with binding court orders, which have appropriate jurisdiction over the organization .”
What do you think about Ethereum’s 39 addresses blacklist? Let me know in the comment box.