Tether, the company that developed the world’s largest stablecoin, USDT
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, Yesterday it was announced that it would ‘freeze’ tokens held in the wallets of sanctioned individuals on the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Sanctioned Persons List. In the announcement, Tether described the move as a “voluntary measure to proactively prevent potential misuse of Tether tokens and strengthen our security measures.”
According to blockchain data accessed via Etherscan, Tether actually froze 161 Ethereum wallets yesterday, but 150 of those wallets currently do not have USDT tokens. It is unclear whether or how many of your wallets hold USDT tokens at any point in time.
The remaining 11 wallets hold over 3.5 million USDT tokens, but almost all of them – 3.4 million – are held in just one address. Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT linked this address to the recent hack of betting platform Stake. The wallet in question was activated shortly before the freeze took effect and has seen hundreds of transactions over the past week.
Of the remaining wallets containing USDT tokens, two addresses hold approximately 20,000 tokens each, and a third address holds nearly 60,000 tokens. The rest hold smaller amounts. Each wallet contains only 16 cents. With frozen USDT. Two days ago, the day before the freeze, the wallet was used to transfer more than 400,000 USDT. Tor Chain 
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through Having two different wallets makes it difficult to keep track of your funds. Neither of the two wallets used to route USDT appear to have been frozen by Tether.
The wallet can contain USDT tokens from various chains, including the Ethereum Layer 2 network. A search of Polygonscan’s data revealed two wallets with USDT on Polygon. Both wallets hold just over 10,000 tokens combined, and one also holds USDT on Ethereum’s mainnet. A similar search of the approved wallet lists on Arbitrum and Optimism did not return any wallets with USDT balances.
Tether did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment.
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