Can USDC be frozen in your own wallet? What Circle's and Tether's blocklists mean for your tip jar

Updated September 28, 2026

Yes, in narrow cases. Circle can block a wallet address so it can no longer send or receive USDC, even in a self-custody wallet Circle has never touched, and Tether can blacklist an address so it can no longer send USDT. Both blacklisted the same address on September 25, 2026, one that Etherscan labels a Bitget exploiter and CoinDesk links to the Bitget exchange hack. For a creator taking tips from fans a block is very unlikely, but it helps to know what triggers one, what it cannot touch, and how to check an address yourself.

What happened to the wallet linked to the Bitget hack?

Bitget, a large crypto exchange, detected unauthorized transfers out of its hot wallets on September 24, 2026. The loss was first reported at about $351.6 million; BleepingComputer reported that Bitget later revised it to $387.5 million after further on-chain tracing. Bitget's chief executive, Gracy Chen, said attackers compromised a backend system in the wallet infrastructure and ruled out a private key compromise.

The next morning the stablecoin issuers moved. CoinDesk reported that Circle blacklisted the address Etherscan labels "Bitget Exploiter 8" at 05:00 UTC on September 25, and that Tether banned it too. The chain itself confirms it. Circle's blacklist transaction landed in Ethereum block 26,052,241 at 05:00:59 UTC, and Tether's multisig added the same address to the USDT blacklist at 12:19 UTC, about seven hours later.

What each block caught is the useful part:

• Stuck: about 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT, roughly $318,000. On September 28 both balances were still sitting at the address, and both contracts still reported it as blacklisted.
• Not stuck: about 170 ETH in the same wallet. It moved to another address labeled as a Bitget exploiter at 02:23 UTC on September 26, after both stablecoin blocks were in place. No issuer controls ETH, so nobody could stop it on-chain.
• Elsewhere: CoinDesk, citing MistTrack's tracker, noted that other exploiter addresses still held more than 63,000 ETH, which no issuer can freeze.

Bitget, meanwhile, paused withdrawals of every coin it held for customers. It began reopening them on September 28, starting with Bitcoin, and gave an estimated schedule for the rest: ether on September 29, USDT on September 30, and other tokens, fiat and peer-to-peer withdrawals from October 2, according to BleepingComputer. Bitget said its separate self-custody app, Bitget Wallet, was not affected. That contrast is the whole story in miniature: an issuer can block a token anywhere, and an exchange can hold anything you keep with it.

Can Circle freeze USDC in a wallet it does not control?

Yes. Circle's Stablecoin Access Denial Policy says it can deny access to individual addresses "on every blockchain to which Circle Stablecoin is issued." When it does, the address "can no longer send or receive Circle Stablecoin" and all of the USDC it holds is blocked. The block works on the whole address; the policy says Circle cannot target individual tokens.

It does not matter that you never signed up with Circle. The USDC Terms, last updated December 12, 2025, say that by obtaining and using USDC you agree to them "regardless of whether or not you are a customer of Circle." The Terms cover holders outside the European Economic Area, and holders inside it are pointed to Circle's USDC white paper instead. Either way, the on-chain blocklist works on any address, so a creator who receives USDC tips into a phone wallet is subject to the same blocking as an exchange.

The mechanism lives in the token contract itself. On Ethereum, the current USDC contract checks both the sender and the recipient against a blacklist on every transfer, and refuses the transfer with the message "Blacklistable: account is blacklisted" if either one is listed. In the current version a blocked balance is not deleted. It stays recorded at the address and becomes usable again if Circle removes the block.

One wording detail in the Terms trips people up. Their "Blocked Addresses" clause says Circle may "freeze associated USDC" when the address is one Circle holds in custody. The on-chain block that stops any address, self-custody included, comes from a separate "Blocklisting" paragraph and the access denial policy. The effect for you is the same: the USDC at a blocked address cannot move.

When does Circle actually block an address?

The policy's default is that Circle "will not deny access to individual addresses" except in the situations it lists as exceptions:

1. A threat to the network. For example, a compromised privileged key such as the key that mints new USDC.
2. Legal compulsion. A law, regulation or legal order from a US or French authority or court, or another government authority with jurisdiction over Circle.
3. Urgent requests. Certain law-enforcement requests while a court order is pending, certain government requests tied to sanctions or imminent national-security threats, and certain court orders going through international legal-assistance channels.

Circle also reserves the right to object to an order it considers a threat to the stablecoin. Its chief executive, Jeremy Allaire, put the stance plainly in April: "Circle follows the rule of law, and we are able to undertake actions such as freezing a wallet at the direction of law enforcement or the courts," he said, as reported by CoinDesk. That approach has drawn criticism. After the roughly $285 million Drift hack in April, critics said Circle moved too slowly while stolen USDC crossed chains. We found no statement from Circle on which exception it relied on for the Bitget block.

Blocks are not only for thieves, and they are not always permanent. In March 2026, Circle blocked a batch of business wallets, including gambling sites and payment processors, under what reports described as a sealed US civil court order, and unblocked one belonging to Goated.com three days later. Reports counted 16 wallets in that order. On-chain records show Circle's blacklister account blocking 80 addresses in under an hour on March 23, though the records do not show which of them the court order covered. By September 28, all but one of the 80 had been unblocked.

Is USDT different?

Tether gives itself wider room. Its terms of service, last updated February 26, 2026, let it freeze tokens "as required by applicable Law or where Tether, in its sole discretion, determines it is prudent to do so." The penalties for prohibited use include blacklisting any address that holds Tether tokens, and Tether disclaims liability for losses caused by freezes, seizures or other legal process asserted by a government.

The Ethereum USDT contract also behaves differently from USDC. A blacklisted address cannot send USDT, but it can still receive it, because the contract only checks the sender. Tether's owner account can also call a function that wipes a blacklisted address's balance to zero. So if a USDT tip address were ever blacklisted, tips sent to it would still arrive and then be stuck.

Tether freezes far more often than Circle, going by the one independent count we found: a December 2025 report from the blockchain analytics firm AMLBot counted 7,268 blacklisted USDT addresses on Ethereum and Tron in its 2023 to 2025 data, against 372 blacklisted USDC addresses. In a release published September 28, 2026, Tether said it works with more than 340 law-enforcement agencies in 67 countries and that these efforts have frozen more than $4.9 billion in assets. Those are Tether's own figures. Our comparison of USDC and USDT for creators covers the other differences between the two coins.

Does this apply on Solana, Base and Polygon?

Yes, but each chain keeps its own list. Native USDC on Base, Polygon and Arbitrum each has its own blacklist and its own blacklister account. When we checked on September 28, the Bitget address blocked on Ethereum was not blocked on any of those three. A block on one chain does not follow the address to another.

Solana works through the token program rather than a blacklist. The USDC mint on Solana has a freeze authority set, and so does the USDT mint. Solana's documentation says a frozen token account keeps its owner and balance but cannot receive, transfer or burn tokens until it is thawed. On Solana, then, a frozen account is stuck in both directions, which is closer to how USDC behaves on Ethereum than to how USDT behaves there.

Bitcoin and ether have no issuer and no contract with a blacklist, so no company can freeze them at the protocol level. That is one real difference behind our comparison of USDC and Bitcoin for tips, alongside price swings and fees.

Does the GENIUS Act require stablecoins to be freezable?

It will. The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law signed on July 18, 2025, requires a permitted issuer to have the "technical capabilities, policies, and procedures to block, freeze, and reject specific or impermissible transactions that violate Federal or State laws, rules, or regulations." A separate provision says an issuer may issue payment stablecoins only if it can comply, and will comply, with "any lawful order."

The Act defines a lawful order narrowly. It must be a final and valid order from a court or an authorized federal agency that requires the issuer to seize, freeze, burn or prevent the transfer of its coins, that identifies the coins or accounts with reasonable particularity, and that can be reviewed or appealed. The Act takes effect on the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators issue final rules to implement it. As of September 28, 2026, the Federal Register showed only proposed rules, so January 18, 2027 is the likely date. Our guide to what the GENIUS Act means for creators covers the rest of the law and its dates.

So freezability is not a quirk of one company. Under US law it is becoming a condition of issuing a payment stablecoin in the United States, and of having a foreign one sold to people there.

What would a block mean for a creator's tip jar?

For almost everyone, nothing. The published triggers are threats to Circle's own stablecoin network, legal orders, and certain urgent law-enforcement, sanctions or national-security requests, and a fan tipping you five dollars is none of those. Still, it helps to know the edge cases:

• If your own address were blocked for USDC, new USDC tips to it would fail and the sender would keep them. The USDC already there would stay put and could not be moved or cashed out until the block was lifted.
• If a fan's address were already blocked, their USDC tip could not reach you at all, because the contract checks the sender too.
• If you received USDC from an address that is later blocked, nothing in Circle's policy says your own address is blocked as a result. The Terms do say that if you send USDC to, or receive USDC from, a Blocked Address, Circle "may freeze such USDC," but they do not say whether that reaches payments made before the block. We found no documented case of Circle blocking someone just for receiving a payment.
• If you were blocked in error, neither Circle's Terms nor its policy describes an appeal process. The policy says Circle may reverse a block once the authority or court that required it confirms the order no longer applies, or once a security incident is over. The Terms list Circle's support team and state regulator complaint routes.

A few habits can keep the exposure small. Some creators cash out on a regular schedule rather than letting a large balance build up in one address, using steps like those in our guide to cashing out USDC, though each conversion can carry fees and may need to be reported for tax. A simple record of when each tip arrived and which address sent it is also useful at tax time. And remember that a centralized exchange adds its own layer of freezes on top of the issuer's, which is the trade-off covered in self-custody vs an exchange.

How do you check whether an address is blocked?

You can read the blacklist yourself in a block explorer, without connecting a wallet.

1. Open the USDC contract on Etherscan. The address is 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48. Check that the page is titled for USDC before going further.
2. Go to Contract, then Read as Proxy. USDC sits behind a proxy contract, so the blacklist function appears under that tab.
3. Find isBlacklisted, paste the address you want to check and press Query. The answer is true or false.
4. For USDT, open the USDT contract (0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7), go to Contract, then Read Contract, and use isBlackListed or getBlackListStatus the same way.
5. Repeat on each chain you use. Native USDC on Base and Polygon has the same isBlacklisted function, with its own separate list, so a check on Ethereum says nothing about those chains. Solana has no isBlacklisted function: a freeze is set on the token account itself, so the check there is whether your USDC token account is frozen, which a Solana block explorer can show.

The result tells you the status on that one contract on that one chain, today. It is not a promise about tomorrow or about any other network. To confirm a tip actually landed, use the explorer steps in how to confirm a crypto tip arrived.

This page is based on Circle's USDC Terms (last updated December 12, 2025) and Stablecoin Access Denial Policy, Tether's terms of service (last updated February 26, 2026) and its September 28, 2026 release, the GENIUS Act (Pub. L. 119-27), Solana's token documentation, reporting by CoinDesk and BleepingComputer on the Bitget hack, CoinDesk's April 13, 2026 report quoting Jeremy Allaire, news reports on Circle's March 2026 blocks, AMLBot's December 2025 count of blacklisted addresses, and our own reading on September 28, 2026 of the USDC and USDT contracts and blacklist transactions on Ethereum, the USDC contracts on Base, Polygon and Arbitrum, and the USDC and USDT mints on Solana. Contracts can be upgraded and policies can change; check the current versions before relying on them. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.