Tether has added three more Ethereum addresses, between them placing more than $150 million worth of USDT stablecoins on its blacklist.
As a centralized company, Tether is able to blacklist addresses it thinks are involved in crime, money laundering – or for any other reason it chooses.
This is the first time Tether has blacklisted an address in 2022, but it has added 312 addresses to the blacklist last year and 563 since it first did so on November 28, 2017.
Tether has not disclosed why the three new addresses were blacklisted, although it has used its power to blacklist addresses involved in cyber attacks and law enforcement investigations. Following the Kucoin hack in September 2020, Tether froze approximately $35 million USDT to prevent hackers from capitalizing on their theft.
There could also be “precautionary reasons” for the blacklisting, such as being linked to scams, which Eric Wall, CIO of Arcane Asset, noted as the reason for a separate Tether freeze in 2020.
Concerns about the lack of decentralization could be a factor in the adoption of the TeraUSD (UST) stablecoin from the algo stablecoin blockchain Terra. It is currently the fourth largest stablecoin with a market cap of $10.6 billion. However, the market cap of the decentralized challenger is still low compared to USDT, which is the fourth largest cryptocurrency overall, with a market cap of $78.5 billion.
related: Crypto regulation concerns make decentralized stablecoins attractive to DeFi investors
Terra founder Do Kwon tweeted in response to news of Tether’s actions that there was no way to blacklist UST addresses.
