What Tether's multisig proposal does to an address
USDT exists as two contracts that matter at scale: TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t on TRON and 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7 on Ethereum. A token that calls itself USDT from any other contract is not Tether's USDT, whatever a wallet app displays on screen. TrustSniffer's freeze tracker only follows proposals against these two contracts, because a copycat contract has no connection to Tether's multisig and nothing on it can be frozen by Tether at all.
On each of the two real contracts, Tether can act against a single address. The mechanism behind this article is a proposal Tether's multisig submits on-chain, which the contract then enforces against that address: the address stops being able to move the tokens it holds, and no other balance on the network is touched. This article covers that specific mechanism, the issuer's on-chain freeze, because it is the one we can measure directly. An exchange placing a hold on your account, or a counterparty disputing a peer-to-peer trade, is a different kind of stop with no public multisig proposal behind it, and we don't cover those here.
TrustSniffer matched 1,012 freezes against 1,017 flags
Since 2026-07-14, we have flagged wallets as freeze targets by watching Tether's multisig proposals as they are submitted, ahead of the on-chain freeze itself. As of 2026-10-09, that is 1,018 wallets. For 1,017 of them the outcome is known, and 1,012 of those were frozen by the issuer: a 99.5% hit rate. At the moment the freeze landed, the wallets we had flagged held $428 million between them, money that could no longer move once the contract enforced the block.
The head start is much shorter on TRON than on Ethereum:
- On TRON, 925 of the frozen wallets were flagged from Tether's multisig proposal, with a median head start of 5 minutes before the freeze executed.
- On Ethereum, 83 were flagged the same way, with a median head start of 33 minutes.
When one chain's freeze signals the other
Across both networks, the median head start between a flag and the issuer's freeze is 8 minutes, and nine in ten freezes land within 3.2 hours of the flag. The current count, updated as new proposals are submitted, is in the live USDT freeze tracker.
Four of the frozen wallets were on our flag list only because of what happened to a different address on a different chain. One private key can control an address on Ethereum and a separate address on TRON. When Tether's multisig names one of the pair in a freeze proposal, we flag the other at once, before any proposal naming it exists.
A made-up example: a multisig proposal names an Ethereum address and Tether freezes it. The TRON address controlled by the same key has no proposal against it yet, so a search of the proposal record alone would show it as clear. We flag it anyway, and in those four cases the issuer went on to freeze it.
The public record names the address only once the freeze has executed
The public record of pending freeze proposals omits the target address and the exact amount until the freeze executes. Our head start comes from somewhere else: we watch the multisig submission itself as it arrives, the on-chain proposal described above. A holder who relies on the public record gets no advance notice to move funds before the freeze lands. The tracker shows what has already happened to an address, whether a flag from a submission we saw or an executed freeze.
A clean result today, with no match for an address in the tracker, says nothing about a proposal that has not been submitted yet. The result is current only as of the moment you ran it, so check again before you rely on it.
Running the check: contract, explorer, tracker
Three checks, each on a public explorer or on our tracker, tell you whether a deposit came through the genuine contract and whether the sender has been flagged.
To see whether a specific address carries a freeze flag, run it through our wallet checker. It draws on the same freeze data covered here. A flag means the address is on our list of freeze targets. No flag means we had seen no proposal naming it at the moment you ran the check.
If the contract matches the official address and the sending address carries no flag in the tracker, the issuer's freeze has not touched that sender, and the deposit is ordinary USDT in your balance. If the contract does not match, the token is not Tether's USDT and the freeze question does not arise. If the sender carries a flag, or you cannot tell, treat the deposit as unresolved. Because it has merged into your balance, that means not moving funds out of that address until you can account for it, and running the check again before you act.
- Confirm the contract. On TRON, genuine USDT is TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t; on Ethereum, it is 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7. A wallet app that just shows "USDT" without the contract address can be showing a lookalike token instead.
- Look up the address on the matching explorer. Tronscan shows the sender, recipient, token contract, amount and time for a TRON address or transaction hash; Etherscan shows the same fields for Ethereum. Read down the transfer history and check the contract column against the address from step one.
- Check the balance context. An ERC-20 or TRC-20 token keeps one balance per address. A deposit you did not expect adds straight into that balance; it is not held apart from the rest of your USDT, and the explorer will not mark it as separate either.
