Tether freezes $1.45 million in THORChain's vaults, then lets go within hours, with no explanation

Tether showed on Friday how much power a stablecoin issuer holds over the protocols that use its token. The company blacklisted four vault addresses belonging to THORChain, a cross-chain trading protocol, on the Tron network, freezing about 1.45 million USDT, Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing reported.

The four vaults held 93% of THORChain's assets on Tron, where it runs six in all, according to Crypto Briefing. THORChain paused Tron swaps and liquidity-provider operations while the money was stuck. Tether lifted the blacklist at about 15:30 UTC the same day and the balances came back intact, Crypto Briefing said. No hack or theft was reported.

Chad Barraford, THORChain's technical co-founder, wrote on X before the reversal that the team had had no communication with Tether and did not know the reason. He said he hoped the freeze was "made in error / misunderstanding." Tether has not explained the freeze or why it was undone, and Cointelegraph said it had not received a reply from the company.

The episode came in the same week that Conduit Technology sued Tether over $2.76 million of frozen USDT. Tether has used its blacklist function more than 11,000 times, Crypto Briefing said, usually against wallets tied to scams, hacks or sanctions, not a protocol's own vaults.

What to watch: whether Tether says why it acted, and whether THORChain changes how it holds USDT on Tron.