Chad Barraford, co-founder of THORChain, said his platform had received no warning when Tether blacklisted four of its USDT vaults on the TRON blockchain on 9 October. The action froze approximately 1.45 million USDT, disrupted trading on THORChain and halted TRON swaps.
Tether removed the four addresses from its blacklist about three hours later, with the balances intact. Barraford called the move “unprecedented in our industry” and said: “We don't know why this choice was made and have had no comms with USDT before this action”.
The episode came after the European Securities and Markets Authority, or ESMA, issued an opinion on 8 October 2026 requiring crypto firms authorised under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation to end services involving noncompliant stablecoins by 8 January 2027. The deadline is three months from the opinion.
MiCA is the European Union’s comprehensive framework for crypto-assets. ESMA’s requirement reaches trading, custody, transfers, advice, portfolio management, exchange services, token placing, and the execution, receipt or transmission of orders.
National regulators can allow narrowly defined services to wind down existing holdings, including liquidation, conversion, withdrawal, transfer or safekeeping. ESMA said any such permission should be time-limited, clearly explained to clients and closely supervised.
The regulator presumes that custody and transfer services are incompatible with the requirements. It said firms should put technical, contractual and organisational controls in place to stop clients acquiring affected tokens or increasing their positions.
ESMA’s view is that warnings or client acknowledgments cannot adequately address the risks created when issuer-level safeguards are absent.
USDT is in the spotlight of the EU’s stablecoin rules, and Tether is absent from ESMA’s register of e-money-token issuers.
There were 1,757 MiCA authorisations granted to 1,536 companies across the European Union.
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