Tether, a company with the biggest stablecoin internationally, USDT, has decided to block all tokens in the wallets of sanctioned persons. These will involve people who are on the United States’ Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) list. As per Tether, this is necessary to safeguard against the misutilization of Tether tokens and increase safety factors.
Blockchain data made available via Etherscan spells out that Tether has blocked 161 Ethereum wallets. However, out of this, 150 wallets do not contain USDT tokens.
The balance of 11 wallets contains more than 3.5 million USDT tokens, with one address containing 3.4 million USDT tokens. ZachXBT, which is a blockchain investigative agency, has found a connection between the address and the hacking of the wagering platform, Stake. There was increased traction noticed in the wallet prior to the blocking.
As for the rest of the wallets containing USDT tokens, the two addresses have roughly 20,000 tokens each. A third wallet contains almost 60,000 USDT tokens. The balance wallets have insignificant figures, one of them as low as 16 cents in blocked USDT. A day prior to the blocking, the wallet was responsible for shifting more than 400,000 USDT obtained from THORChain. There were no dealings whatsoever in USDT in two wallets.
It is probable that they have USDT tokens on other chains, such as Ethereum Layer 2 networks. A tracking of data through Polygonscan came up with two wallets containing USDT on Polygon. However, the wallets jointly contained a little more than 10,000 tokens. One wallet has USDT on Ethereum’s mainnet. A comparable search on Arbitrum and Optimism’s sanctioned wallet list yielded no wallets with USDT balances.