Today, the conversation around USDT isn’t about its price—it’s about who can press the freeze button.
Tether’s CEO disputed figures in a report while saying that around $550 million worth of USDT had been frozen. The news didn’t move the price, but it shifted the discussion from depegging to something else.
Freezing is becoming USDT’s most compelling narrative. An on-chain security investigator publicly said he had helped Tether freeze around 4.42 million USDT in the Bybit case. He also said money-laundering groups split “dirty USDT” among downstream brokers to get around freezes. These claims have yet to be verified by additional sources.
Meanwhile, mainstream adoption still seems a long way off. Visa surveyed 14,250 people across 14 Asia-Pacific markets: 46% said they might use stablecoins in the next five years, while only 16% had actually used them in the past 12 months.
So today, talking about USDT means talking about two sides of the same issue: who can enter the market in compliance with regulations, and who can be kicked off the blockchain at the press of a button. For individual accounts, though, the more common threat isn’t a freeze—it’s fake wallets and altered multisig authorizations.
Is the ability to freeze funds a passport for stablecoins to go mainstream, or the reason they’ll never make it onto some people’s balance sheets?
Tether’s CEO disputed figures in a report while saying that around $550 million worth of USDT had been frozen. The news didn’t move the price, but it shifted the discussion from depegging to something else.
Freezing is becoming USDT’s most compelling narrative. An on-chain security investigator publicly said he had helped Tether freeze around 4.42 million USDT in the Bybit case. He also said money-laundering groups split “dirty USDT” among downstream brokers to get around freezes. These claims have yet to be verified by additional sources.
Meanwhile, mainstream adoption still seems a long way off. Visa surveyed 14,250 people across 14 Asia-Pacific markets: 46% said they might use stablecoins in the next five years, while only 16% had actually used them in the past 12 months.
So today, talking about USDT means talking about two sides of the same issue: who can enter the market in compliance with regulations, and who can be kicked off the blockchain at the press of a button. For individual accounts, though, the more common threat isn’t a freeze—it’s fake wallets and altered multisig authorizations.
Is the ability to freeze funds a passport for stablecoins to go mainstream, or the reason they’ll never make it onto some people’s balance sheets?