A right of life and death on USDT – At the end of December 2021, we learned that the Myanmar (ex-Burma) government of national unity was using Tether’s USDT as its official local currency. But unlike Bitcoin (BTC), the decentralization of this dollar stablecoin is very questionable … and the example of the day confirms it.
One Million USDT Frozen With One Click
If the stablecoin USDT can present some of the advantages brought by Bitcoin, thanks to the technology of the distributed ledgers (DLT), it is nonetheless overseen by a private company, as it happens Tether. A company that is itself part of the iFinex group, which notably owns the crypto-exchange Bitfinex.
The company Tether being the issuer of the USDT – against a backing in US dollars or similar assets -, it is also responsible before the laws anti money laundering (AML) or the fight against the financing of terrorism.
Result: a wallet address with nearly 1.1 million USDT just saw this sum completely frozen and unusable.
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An address blacklisted by Tether at the request of regulators
According to a statement by a Tether spokesperson to crypto-media The Block, the USDT issuing company “Works regularly” with regulators and law enforcement around the world:
“Thanks to the freezing of addresses [suspectes], Tether has been able to help recover funds that have been compromised or stolen by hackers. “
Tether thus made use of the function “AddedBlacklist”on December 30, 2021, to block USDT funds from the above address. No detail was given on theidentity of the person or group concerned, nor the precise reasons for the total censorship of its USDT transactions.
According to data from The Block, Tether has already blocked as well more than 500 addresses on the only Ethereum network since 2017 – knowing that the USDT is also present on several other blockchains.
Going back to our introduction with the case of Myanmar, it is easy to imagine what would happen if a government that adopted the USDT suddenly became “terrorist” or “dictatorial” in the eyes of a state powerful enough to twist its arm. the company Tether. Tether comes, one more time, to demonstrate the centralization of its stablecoin, and that the choice of Bitcoin as currency by El Salvador seems a much better option.
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