Tether froze roughly 30 times more value than Circle between 2023 and 2025, underscoring sharply different enforcement styles by the two biggest stablecoin issuers, new AMLBOT data shows.
Key findings
- Tether froze about $3.3 billion in crypto assets across 7,268 addresses during 2023–2025; Circle froze roughly $109 million across 372 addresses in the same period.
- More than 2,800 of Tether’s freezes were conducted in coordination with U.S. law enforcement and targeted funds linked to scams and other criminal activity.
- Over 53% of frozen Tether tokens were located on Tron, while about $1.54 billion in Tether on Ethereum is currently held in banned wallets.
- Circle’s banned-wallet total on Ethereum closely matches its overall freeze figure ($109.25 million), reflecting its narrower scope of action.
Different playbooks: rapid intervention vs. legal restraint
AMLBOT’s data highlights a stark operational divergence. Tether uses an active “freeze, burn and reissue” process that not only blocks access to blacklisted tokens but can invalidate and reissue recovered funds under controlled conditions—enabling quicker, large-scale intervention and fund recovery. That model helps explain its far larger freezing totals and heavy use of Tron.
By contrast, Circle limits freezes to cases with explicit court orders or regulatory directives and does not burn or reissue tokens after freezing. That legal-formality approach produced a much smaller footprint of frozen assets and fewer sanctioned addresses.
Why it matters
The gap in freezing activity has practical and policy implications for crypto users, custodians and regulators. Tether’s aggressive stance can speed criminal fund recovery and cooperation with authorities but raises censorship and centralization concerns for some participants. Circle’s more restrained, court-driven policy emphasizes legal safeguards and predictability but may slow enforcement actions in some investigations.
Issuer policies, jurisdictional cooperation and the technical mechanics each company uses shape how stablecoin holdings behave during compliance actions, and AMLBOT’s data makes those differences unusually apparent. For traders, developers and compliance teams, the choice of stablecoin—and the chain it’s held on—now carries clearer operational risk and regulatory signaling than before.
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