Tether Freezes 971 Million USDT in Wallet Linked to Suspected Binance Drain

Tether blacklisted an Ethereum wallet holding roughly 971 million $USDT on Oct. 29, restricting movement of stablecoins at an address that received funds from a wallet Etherscan labels “Binance 14.” The freeze transaction confirmed at 5:01:35 p.m. ET.

Binance said at 5:16 p.m. ET that it was investigating reports of a potential security issue. “At this stage, we have not confirmed any impact to user funds,” the exchange said.

The blacklist blocks movement of the affected $USDT; it does not itself return funds to Binance or its customers. The onchain action establishes Tether’s intervention at the recipient wallet, but not whether the earlier transfers were unauthorized or how much Binance may have lost.

The transaction’s event log shows that the $USDT contract added the recipient address to its blacklist in Ethereum block 26,300,954. Blacklist tracker blocklist.fyi recorded its at-freeze $USDT balance as $971,149,299.48. The blacklist event identifies the address, rather than stating a frozen amount.

The link to Binance-labeled funds is visible in an earlier Ethereum transaction. At 4:24:23 p.m. ET, it moved about 1.615 billion $USDT and 167,464 ETH from the address labeled Binance 14 to the same wallet Tether subsequently blacklisted.

Analyst @mattiascaricato estimated that about $3.5 billion had been drained across three wallets labeled Binance 14, Binance 16 and Hot Wallet 34. In a subsequent post citing the freeze transaction, the analyst called the blacklisted recipient the “main attacker wallet.” That characterization and the wider loss estimate remain unconfirmed by Binance.

Binance said its security teams were reviewing the information and would provide updates through official channels. It also warned users not to trust unofficial links, messages or requests for account information.

Tether has used its freezing powers in other large cases. In April, it said it froze $344 million in $USDT across two addresses in cooperation with U.S. authorities, an action previously covered by The Defiant.