Bitcoin promised no one could stop a payment. Stablecoin issuers froze $6.4 billion

01 · Two walletsTether froze $344 million in one afternoon

If you hold USDT, the company that issues it can freeze your coins. On 23 April this year, Tether did that to two wallets holding $344 million between them. Nobody had to stop a blockchain. The coins just stopped moving.

Both wallets were on TRON, the chain where Tether does most of its freezing. A day later the US Treasury's sanctions office, OFAC, added both to its list under its entry for Iran's central bank. Tether said it had worked with OFAC and US law enforcement. They are the two largest single freezes we found.

Bitcoin's white paper set out to remove exactly this kind of control. It describes cash sent straight from one person to another, with no bank in the middle. Stablecoins don't work that way. They are dollar tokens issued by companies, known as stablecoin issuers, and the issuers kept the power to stop them.

We counted every freeze we could find on-chain over ten years. Some were by stablecoin issuers, some by the chains themselves. We put a dollar value on each one as of the day it happened. Stablecoin issuers froze $6.4 billion. Blockchains froze, moved or rolled back $755 million. That puts nine in ten dollars stopped on-chain in the hands of issuers, and Tether alone stopped 97% of the issuer side.

02 · The switchCan stablecoins be frozen?

Yes, and it takes one transaction. A stablecoin is a token that tracks a currency, most often the US dollar. Tether issues USDT, the largest. Circle issues USDC, and Paxos issues USDP and PAXG, a gold token. Each token is a smart contract that keeps its own record of who holds what, on TRON, Ethereum and many other chains.

These contracts come with a blacklist. Once Tether adds a wallet to it, the wallet's USDT cannot be sent. Tether can later take the wallet off the list, or burn the frozen balance and pay the same amount to someone else from its Treasury. Paxos has the same switches, and Circle can freeze and unfreeze USDC. The chain keeps running the whole time.

Blockchains can stop money too, but it takes more people. On a proof-of-stake chain such as Sui or BNB Chain, validators are the computers that run the network. They can agree to freeze a wallet, halt the chain or roll it back to undo a hack. Most of them have to go along. A softer form needs no agreement at all. Block builders and miners pick which waiting transactions go into each block. One of them can leave a transaction out of its own block, and the transaction waits for someone else's.

03 · The countWho freezes crypto: mostly stablecoin issuers

For each dollar a chain stopped, a stablecoin issuer stopped more than $8. Most of the issuer side sits on just two chains, TRON and Ethereum.

Issuers froze more almost every year, and hit a record $2.4 billion this year. The chains acted in bursts instead, most of them after big hacks.

04 · TetherTether does almost all the freezing

Tether froze 97% of the issuer total. Its USDT on TRON alone makes up 64%. Circle and Paxos, the next two, froze far less.

Counted by number of freezes, Tether made 69% of them. Many of Circle's freezes copy its Ethereum list onto newer chains like Base and Arbitrum, where those wallets hold almost nothing. We went through every USDT freeze on Ethereum and TRON in an earlier piece.

05 · The reasonsWhy does crypto money get frozen?

Tether and Circle seldom say why they froze a wallet. We matched each freeze to the OFAC list as it stood that day and to published police and court cases. Then we checked our address labels. For 77% of frozen dollars we found no reason at all.

Sanctions explain only a small part. Wallets already on the OFAC list make up 16% of all freezes but only 2.1% of the dollars. Most of them were empty when frozen. The bigger sanctions share comes from freezes like the opening one, where OFAC listed the wallets in the days after the freeze. All the sanctions cases together come to about 9%.

When OFAC does list a wallet, Tether now freezes it fast, most often the same day. Since 2024, 76% of its freezes of listed wallets came inside 7 days of the listing. It has frozen every TRON wallet on the list at some point.

Our labels point the same way. 17% of frozen wallets carry a crime or sanctions label, and they hold 13% of the frozen dollars. 77% carry nothing that says who owns them. A few hundred belong to ordinary businesses, like exchange deposit wallets, with no crime label at all.

Even that split is too kind to the labels. Wallets still frozen carry a label of some kind far more often than ones that were later let go, so some labels were likely added after the freeze. Some freezes also end. 11% were later reversed, after a median 96 days. In late March and early April, Circle and Tether froze 529 wallets, then lifted all of those freezes by late May.

06 · The speedDoes freezing catch the money in time?

A freeze only helps if the money is still there. For each wallet's first freeze, we checked how much of the USDT it got had already left. Wallets frozen within a week of their first USDT had already sent out 41% of it on Ethereum and 75% on TRON. Wait half a year, and little is left.

Even same-day freezes leak. Freeze a wallet the day its first USDT arrives, or the day after, and 37% of the money has still left on Ethereum. On TRON it is 54%. And few freezes are that fast. Only 23% of frozen wallets were caught in their first week, and on TRON that share has fallen since 2023.

These dollar shares lean on a few big wallets that pass money through. The 10 largest frozen TRON wallets received 65% of all USDT that reached frozen TRON wallets. Wallet by wallet, the two chains split. Half of frozen Ethereum wallets sent nothing before their freeze, while the median TRON wallet had already sent on 92%.

Hacks show both sides. When the thief left the coins in place, a fast freeze worked. Tether and Circle froze $119 million from the KuCoin, Poly Network and Multichain thieves, each within about a day. Thieves who kept moving had little frozen. Less than 1% of the $47.6 million in stablecoins taken on Ethereum in the Bitget hack was frozen. In the Ledger wallet drain, Tether froze 14% of the stolen USDT.

07 · AfterWhat happens to frozen USDT?

Most frozen USDT stays frozen. Of the USDT Tether froze in wallets on Ethereum and TRON, 67% is still frozen. Tether destroyed 22% and released 12% back to the holders. Releases came far faster on TRON, a median 49 days after the freeze. On Ethereum the median wait was over a year.

Frozen wallets also keep getting paid. A frozen USDT wallet cannot send, but it can still receive. $330 million arrived in frozen wallets after their freeze, and more than half of it is still stuck.

When Tether destroys a frozen balance, the same amount usually goes back out of its Treasury. Tether's Treasury is the wallet it issues new USDT from. For 83% of what Tether destroyed, the Treasury paid out the exact same amount, a median 5 minutes from the burn. Most of those payouts, 94%, went to addresses that pass money straight into the crypto exchange Bitfinex. On-chain the trail ends inside the exchange, so we cannot see whose account was credited. To follow money like this yourself, ask the Bitquery MCP server.

The biggest match fits the US Secret Service seizure made public in June 2025. It covers 7 Ethereum wallets Tether had frozen 19 months before. Tether burned the coins in 6 of them, and 27 minutes later the Treasury paid out the sum of all seven, about $225 million, to one address. That address sent it on to a Bitfinex hot wallet 12 seconds later. Tether burned the seventh wallet's coins 3 hours after the payout.

08 · The chainsWhen blockchains freeze, halt or roll back

The other side of the count is small. Blockchains step in rarely, and mostly after big hacks. The biggest case was BNB Chain in 2022. After a bridge hack, its validators halted the chain and blocked the hacker's wallet, trapping $289 million in BNB.

Other chains did the same. In 2025, Sui's validators froze $162 million stolen from Cetus, a DEX on Sui, and a vote later sent it back. This April, Arbitrum's Security Council, a group that can push emergency changes, stepped in after a hack. It moved $71.6 million in ETH out of the Kelp DAO exploiter's wallet. In August, Cronos rolled back its chain to undo the Tectonic exploit.

Some of that money goes back. Of the $755 million, $207 million went back to the people it was taken from, and $121 million partly did. For most of the rest, including BNB Chain's, we could not find out.

09 · The blocksIs Bitcoin censorship resistant?

Bitcoin's promise rests on a different layer: who gets to put payments into blocks. That kind of censorship leaves no freeze behind. Ethereum is where it has been tested most. There, block builders put together most blocks, and some of them leave out transactions that touch sanctioned wallets. Those transactions can still get into someone else's block. We tested each builder, quarter by quarter, for blocks with fewer sanctioned transactions than chance would give.

For nearly two years, builders that leave them out made about half of all Ethereum blocks, and 64% at the peak. Since the US lifted its Tornado Cash sanctions, so few such transactions are left that the test gives no firm answer.

On Bitcoin, there is little to test. Since late 2018, only about one Bitcoin block in 590 held a payment to or from a wallet on the OFAC list.

That is too few to say whether any mining pool leaves them out on purpose. One pool, F2Pool, said it had filtered such payments. In December 2024 it mined none of the 11 such blocks it would normally have found. So is Bitcoin censorship resistant? Mostly, yes. A bitcoin payment cannot be frozen, and a payment one pool leaves out can still go into the next block another pool finds.

That is the split this count shows. Blockchains rarely stop anyone. The issuers of the stablecoins on top of them freeze thousands of wallets a year, mostly without saying why. If you hold USDT or USDC, the company that issues it decides whether your coins can move.

10 · How sureHow sure are these numbers?

The headline holds when we change the rules. Counted 5 other ways, the issuers' share stays between 84% and 95%. It falls to 76% only in one case. That is if we count the aUSD stablecoin a bug minted on Acala, a chain in the Polkadot network, at face value. We treat it as worth nothing.

Some freezes are missing. Tether and others have reported $676 million in freezes our data cannot see. The largest is a Tether freeze for Turkey. Adding them raises the issuer share to 90%. Our Tether totals match our earlier census of every USDT freeze. They also agree with the 2025 address counts of BlockSec, a security firm that tracks USDT freezes.

11 · MethodHow we did this

We read every freeze, unfreeze and burn in ten tokens on Ethereum: seven stablecoins, two gold tokens and Circle's cirBTC. We also read USDT on TRON, and USDC on Base, Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon. The records come from Bitquery's on-chain data for each chain, starting with Ethereum. Each freeze is valued at the wallet's balance at that moment, priced that day. A wallet frozen again while still frozen counts once.

Chain actions come from the chains' own posts, and from our data for BNB Chain and Arbitrum. The block tests compare each builder's or pool's blocks with what chance would give. The full transfer histories are also sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store, for Ethereum and TRON.

12 · EvidenceTransactions and wallets cited

FAQ

Can Tether freeze my USDT?

Yes. USDT has a blacklist built in. Once Tether adds a wallet, its USDT cannot be sent. Tether has frozen $6.2 billion this way on Ethereum and TRON so far.

Can Circle freeze USDC?

Yes. USDC has the same kind of switch. Circle froze $166 million in USDC on the chains we read, often copying the same list of wallets onto each new chain.

Is crypto censorship resistant?

Coins such as bitcoin and ether are hard to stop. Stablecoins are not. Of the money stopped on-chain since 2016, 89% was frozen by stablecoin issuers, and 11% by blockchains.

Is Bitcoin censorship resistant?

Mostly. A bitcoin payment cannot be frozen. Only about one Bitcoin block in 590 held a payment tied to a wallet on the OFAC list. That is too few to tell whether any mining pool keeps them out.

Why does Tether freeze wallets?

It rarely says. For 78% of the dollars Tether froze we found no published reason. About 9% was tied to US sanctions and 7% to published police or court cases.

What happens to frozen USDT?

Most of it stays frozen. 67% of the USDT Tether froze in wallets is still frozen. When Tether burns a frozen balance, it usually pays out an equal amount again within minutes.