Data from stables.rip makes visible the kill switch built into centralised stablecoins: 3.7 billion tokens frozen in six years, three quarters of them in the last two.
What is the privilege of administering a smart contract worth, measured in frozen dollars? Stables.rip, a new public tracker dedicated to stablecoin censorship, offers a quantified answer: $3.7 billion frozen by just two issuers over the past six years, across the Ethereum and Tron blockchains.
Of that total, $2.8 billion – equal to 75% – was frozen in the last two years, pointing to a steady acceleration of the practice. In 2025 alone, according to data cited by the source, Tether has frozen 1.26 billion USDT on Ethereum and Tron, subsequently burning 698 million through the destroyBlackFunds function, which allows blocked funds to be permanently eliminated.
Circle, issuer of USDC, has shown the same willingness to act. In August 2022, when the US Treasury Department sanctioned the privacy tool Tornado Cash, Circle immediately froze approximately 75,000 USDC associated with the addresses affected by the order. Tether initially held a different position, stating it would wait for a law enforcement order before acting. That reserve ran out by the end of 2023: Tether opened access to its systems to the FBI and Secret Service, initiating freezes at their request. The mechanism is identical for stablecoins in the Trump family, USD1 included, which carry equivalent remote-blocking powers.
Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation flagged the tracker on X, commenting that stablecoins have utility but are not “freedom money.” Matt Odell summed it up: “Two billion frozen in two years. Wild.”
