Centre froze an Ethereum address on behalf of law enforcement

The crypto industry has always been considered freer than the traditional finance industry. One of the reasons for this was the fact that it is borderless. Another is the fact that no one can just freeze your funds if they wanted to. At least, that is what was believed so far.

Ethereum address was blacklisted for the first time

Usually, funds on ETH are held and controlled by the address owner. However, when it comes to USDC, the address can be blacklisted and restricted.

However, recently, the law enforcement made a request that an address is blacklisted, and a company that issues USD Coin, Centre, obliged. This is the first case of its kind, where the blacklist function was called, it blacklisted an Ethereum address that held $100,000 in USDC.

At this point, nobody knows why this happened. Neither the law enforcement nor Centre itself provided the public with a reason. Centre did release a statement, however, but all it did was to confirm the blacklisting.

“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,” said the firm.

The company's spokesperson even confirmed that they cannot release any specific details, which may mean that the address in question was involved in other crypto-related crimes.

An address might belong to a crypto thief

There is also a comment on another address, in which one crypto user claims that the blacklisted address' owner had robbed him of his tokens. Allegedly, the blacklisted address' owner stole 10,000 Loopring Coin (750 EUR) from this individual's wallet.

As for USDC, the coin Centre is issuing, it recently managed to hit a $1 billion market cap, which made it the second-largest stablecoin, and one of only a handful of coins with a m.cap above $1 billion.

Now, however, crypto users are concerned about the centralization of stablecoins, suggesting that there is no way to be sure that this will not happen again to someone else.