Cryptocurrency News Today – Headlines for July 10

  • Tether blacklists 39 Ether addresses as a precaution
  • Ethereum addresses blacklisted are worth $46 Million
  • There is a lack of trust among entities in the crypto space

Cryptocurrency News Today – just after Centre blacklisted over 100,000 in USDC, Tether has blacklisted more than $46 million in 39 Ethereum addresses. Tether blacklisted 39 Ether addresses with 24 of those addresses holding over 5.5 million USDT. This report comes after the Centre decides to blacklist an Ethereum address that was holding more than $100,000 USDC.

Ether researcher at Horizon Games Philippe Castonguay issued an analysis of the issue using Dune Analytics. The researcher created a dashboard that follows the total number of addresses that have been blacklisted by Centre and Tether. The results show that the largest blacklisted address held 4.5 million USDT. This address was just blacklisted recently on April 5.

Blacklisted Addresses Can No Longer Transact With Tether

Similar to the blacklisted addresses holding USDC, the Tether addresses that also received a blacklisting function have been decommissioned. They can no longer transact with the Tether token. And all of the existing coins held in these addresses have been frozen. Stuart Hoegner, the general counsel at Bitfinex (an extension of Tether) speaking on the issue said Tether works with law enforcement agencies internationally to blacklist crypto addresses when necessary. Here how Hoegner put it:

Tether routinely assists international law enforcement agencies in their investigations. Through freezing addresses, Tether has managed to help cryptocurrency users and exchanges save and recover millions of USD stole from them by cybercriminals.”

This way Tether can help law enforcement to flush out malicious actors from the digital currency space.

Will There Be Precautionary Measures?

The CIO of Arcane Assets Eric Wall weighed in the issue via a Twitter post. In his post, Wall stated that the most recent freezing of addresses occurred on June 14. The last address to be frozen held more than 939,000 USDT which was received from Binance exchange 22 hours earlier (before the blacklisting was imposed). Apart from this, Wall said that most other freezes happened as a precautionary measure by Tether. Here is how Wall put it:

Most freezes appear that were made on Ethereum addresses are either precautionary (probably accounts identified as scams) or in error to protect other users from making mistakes (like freezing 0x000…0001).”

This recent development within the cryptocurrency space adds to the lack of trust between central organizations in the sector. With resistance particularly over stablecoins and their capacity to be adequately censored. One user gave comments on Castonguay’s post on Twitter that both Dai (DAI) and sUSD are the only two stablecoins that are censorship-resistant. In any case, the decision to freeze assets on 39 Ethereum addresses is purely precautionary. Three Ethereum addresses have since been unfrozen at press time.

Princess Ogono is a writer, lawyer and fitness enthusiast. She believes cryptocurrencies are the future. When she's not writing, she spends time with her adorable cat, Ginger and works out often.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.