Tether freezes $182 million USDT in one day, a rare large-scale action on the Tron chain

【Chain News】Tether has made a major move on the Tron chain. On January 11th, USDT in five wallet addresses was directly frozen, totaling over $182 million — this is no small number.

According to Whale Alert, the balances in these frozen wallets vary significantly, ranging from about $12 million to $50 million. This indicates that Tether did not randomly freeze a small address this time but coordinated the freezing across multiple accounts of relatively large scale. Interestingly, all these freezes occurred on the same day, showing a very organized operation.

Such large-scale single-day wallet restrictions are uncommon on the Tron chain. Looking into the background, Tether officially launched a voluntary wallet freezing policy as early as December 2023. The purpose of this policy is quite clear — to comply with the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN) issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

In simple terms, some addresses have been blacklisted, and as the issuer of stablecoins, Tether needs to freeze the related funds in accordance with U.S. sanctions. While this operation makes sense from a compliance perspective, it still sparks considerable discussion among advocates of blockchain decentralization.