The Centre Consortium, the publisher of the stable coin "USDC", has frozen an Ethereum user wallet for the first time. This user's wallet contained $100,000 USDC tokens.
09 July, 2020 | AtoZ Markets – Crypto makes banks and financial services more accessible. It is borderless. Transfers are much faster than traditional banks and can be set up in minutes instead of days. No one can freeze your wallet if they want. At least it was believed so far.
Centre Blacklists a USDC Address
The Centre Consortium has frozen $100,000 worth of stable coins and blacklisted the USDC address at the request of law enforcement agencies. It means that the owner of the address cannot deposit or withdraw funds. 0x5dB0115f3B72d19cEa34dD697cf412Ff86dc7E1b is the blacklist address.
The Centre has issued a statement confirming blacklisting, although it has not yet revealed the reasons behind the law enforcement demands. Another crypto user claimed that the owner of that blacklist address had stolen his token worth 10,000 loop ring coins (750 euros). Centre said:
"Centre can confirm it blacklisted an address in response to a request from law enforcement. While we cannot comment on the specifics of law enforcement requests, Centre complies with binding court orders that have appropriate jurisdiction over the organization."
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Only the Centre consortium members including Circle, Coinbase can blacklist address and froze the funds. But, they need to vote before freezing the funds. Besides, freezing can be reversible at any time.
"To ensure effective Centre oversight of this Policy, Centre will regularly report publicly, the most up-to-date list of blacklisted addresses, amount of USDC tokens frozen, and corresponding fiat reserves that have been segregated. Besides, this information will be verified and publicly reported by the monthly attestation of Centre's outside accounting firm," the document said.
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