Tether froze approximately 39.27 million USDT across 10 Tron addresses linked to Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language marketplace. MistTrack, the onchain tracing platform developed by SlowMist, first reported the freeze.

The balances were spread unevenly. The largest address held approximately 10.78 million USDT, while three others contained roughly 8 million USDT each. A fifth wallet held around 2.04 million USDT, and two addresses contained approximately 1.28 million and 1.17 million USDT respectively. Three of the addresses held only 1 USDT at the time of MistTrack's report.

MistTrack's transaction map linked one of the largest wallets directly to Xinbi Guarantee, showing transfers from multiple addresses labeled "Guarantee Merchant" with funds moving onward to another Xinbi-linked address. The tracing firm did not identify a law enforcement request behind the freeze in its public statement, and Tether had not publicly detailed the reason for targeting the addresses at the time of reporting.

What Xinbi Guarantee is and how it grew despite enforcement

Xinbi Guarantee emerged on Telegram around 2022 as an escrow marketplace connecting merchants with buyers, with USDT as the primary settlement currency. It serves predominantly Chinese-speaking users across Southeast Asia. TRM Labs estimated total transaction volume since 2022 at $24.2 billion, including $12.1 billion in observed inflows since May 2025.

Elliptic research published in May 2025 attributed at least $8.4 billion in USDT transactions to Xinbi at that point, with its user base growing from 119,000 in August 2024 to 233,000 by May 2025. The same research found approximately $220,000 in USDT connected to the $235 million WazirX hack had passed through Xinbi Guarantee addresses. TRM Labs linked the platform to scam operations, money laundering networks, and cybercrime groups across Southeast Asia.

Guarantee marketplaces like Xinbi and Huione operate on a model borrowed from legitimate escrow services but applied to illicit commerce. A merchant lists services, a buyer contacts them through Telegram, and the platform holds crypto in trust until the transaction is confirmed complete. This model removes the trust problem between anonymous parties transacting in illegal goods, whether stolen data, money laundering services, or fraud infrastructure. The escrow function makes the platform itself a critical node in the criminal supply chain rather than a passive communications channel, which is why enforcement actions target the platform's wallet infrastructure rather than individual users.

Telegram removed thousands of channels associated with Xinbi and Huione Guarantee in May 2025. Xinbi resumed operations within days. TRM Labs found that its daily inflows nearly doubled in the months following the ban while volumes for Haowang, Huione, and Tudou fell sharply. By February 2026, TRM Labs estimated Xinbi had processed $17.9 billion since mid-2025 alone, before the final $24.2 billion total emerged in March 2026. The platform also began migrating toward SafeW, a messaging service, and introduced NewPay, also known as XinbiPay, a crypto wallet that required no know-your-customer checks.

How this freeze fits Tether's broader compliance pattern on Tron

The Xinbi freeze follows a series of USDT restrictions targeting Telegram-based criminal infrastructure. In July 2024, Tether froze more than $28 million in a Tron wallet Bitrace linked to Huione Guarantee. In June 2026, more than $72 million was frozen after onchain investigator ZachXBT traced a wallet that had received 120.2 million USDT. In July 2026, Tether froze USDT across 131 Tron wallets linked by Chainalysis to ISIS-K following US sanctions.

BlockSec data found that Tether blacklisted 4,163 addresses during 2025, freezing $1.26 billion in USDT across Ethereum and Tron, with more than $514 million frozen during a single 30-day period. The concentration of freeze activity on Tron reflects the network's dominant position in illicit USDT flows. Chainalysis data has consistently shown Tron as the preferred network for high-volume crypto crime due to its low transaction fees and the deep liquidity of USDT on the network. Tron's TRC-20 standard makes USDT transfers cheap enough that large volumes of small transactions, typical of scam and money laundering operations, remain economically viable in ways they would not be on Ethereum.

Tether's legal authority to freeze addresses comes from its own smart contract infrastructure rather than from a court order. USDT's smart contract contains a blacklist function that allows Tether to render specific addresses unable to transfer their balances. This function is built into the token contract and operates without requiring action from the underlying blockchain. Critics of centralized stablecoins have cited this freeze capability as evidence that USDT is not truly permissionless, while regulators and law enforcement have increasingly treated it as a compliance tool that stablecoin issuers are expected to use.

The UK sanctioned Xinbi in March 2026 as part of broader efforts against Southeast Asian cybercrime infrastructure. Xinbi continued operating after those sanctions, consistent with its pattern of resuming activity after prior enforcement actions. Neither Tether nor any law enforcement agency had publicly confirmed the specific trigger for the September freeze at the time of publication.

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