Tether froze an address holding $72 M in USDT on the Tron network on the morning of June 12. The freeze followed an investigation by ZachXBT, who tracked the movement of a large sum through exchanges, instant swap services, and cross-chain bridges.
After receiving around $120 M in USDT on the Tron network on June 11, the wallet owner immediately began splitting the funds into smaller portions and moving them across multiple channels. Part of the funds was successfully traced: more than $17.5 M was sent to deposit addresses on KuCoin, while another $8 M went through instant exchange services that do not require identity verification.
A separate flow of more than $8 M was bridged from Tron into Bitcoin and Ether through the Near Intents service, making further tracking significantly more difficult.
Part of the withdrawn funds was converted into Monero, generating heavy buy pressure. The demand was strong enough to push XMR from $330 to $420.
Just minutes after details of the investigation were published, Tether added an address directly connected to the original wallet to its blacklist. At the time of the freeze, the address was holding $72 M in TRC20 USDT.