Tether burn and unfreeze

Tether blacklists and unblacklists wallets. Tether can also burn blacklisted funds. Here is an example that shows all of those features.

0x55Df4Ecd9066C417103F59d3eCc9B309Dedfd131 was blacklisted and unblacklisted. There are several ways to see this.

1. The information is visible in the wallet label

2. You can search using the usual tools

3. Building any query using blacklisting-related tags like some of these

Most likely you are running a report of recently-blacklisted addresses. Here is a dashboard for this address. You will notice an outflow to 0x0.000 or NULL before the blacklisting was lifted.

We can drill in to this as normal and get the transaction hash: 0x0da9684a6bc67db25050a7006e35f576a95b01832a0e8f09c2cd25a9651f139b.

This is not a normal ERC-20 transfer. It comes from a call to DestroyedBlackFunds. You can see this on etherscan here. DashArgos simplifies this for you by showing the flow as a transfer. Notice the flow does not appear in many other sources -- the balance jumps without a corresponding outflow.

These flows are fairly common.

Unblacklisting

In the case of 0x55Df4Ecd9066C417103F59d3eCc9B309Dedfd131 we see the following chain of events:

1. Blacklisted 2022-10-18

2. $863k of funds burned by Tether 2024-03-08

3. Unblacklisted 2024-03-08

This left a balance of about $390k in the wallet. Not everything was burned.

This sure looks like Tether recovered some of the balance for law enforcement and then let the address go with the rest.