Someone moved $120.2 million in USDT into a single Tron wallet on June 11, then started buying Monero in size. The price of XMR surged. Tether noticed, blacklisted the wallet, and froze approximately $72 million in USDT that hadn’t yet left the address.
What happened on-chain
A wallet on the Tron network received 120.2 million USDT in what appears to have been a single large transfer. From there, the funds were routed to exchanges where they were used to place aggressive buy orders for Monero, the leading privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
Those buy orders were large enough to visibly move XMR’s market price. Monero, which by design obscures transaction details like sender, receiver, and amount, is a favorite destination for anyone trying to convert traceable assets into something that can’t be followed.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT flagged the activity and began tracking the wallet’s movements. His analysis highlighted that the wallet’s origins and the identity behind it remain unclear as of June 12. The wallet had no meaningful prior history.
Tether responded by blacklisting the wallet address, effectively preventing any further movement of USDT from it. The company also froze around $72 million in USDT that was still sitting in the wallet at the time of the freeze.
That means roughly $48 million in USDT had already been moved, likely converted into Monero or other assets, before Tether could act. Once funds are swapped into XMR and sent through Monero’s privacy layer, tracing them becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Tether’s blacklisting track record
Tether has frozen billions in USDT linked to suspicious activities over the past three years. The mechanism is built directly into the USDT smart contract: Tether can add any address to a blacklist, rendering the tokens at that address immovable.
The Tron network, where this incident occurred, accounts for a disproportionate share of Tether’s blacklisting activity. Tron’s low transaction fees make it the preferred network for moving large volumes of USDT quickly and cheaply.
Why Monero keeps showing up in these incidents
Monero uses ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transactions to hide the details of every transfer. Unlike Bitcoin, where every transaction is visible on a public ledger, Monero’s privacy is on by default.
When someone dumps tens of millions of dollars of traceable stablecoins into XMR, the price impact is immediate and visible, even if the subsequent Monero transactions are not. The spike in XMR’s price on June 11 was, in effect, the market’s real-time record of a laundering operation in progress.
Several major exchanges have already delisted Monero in recent years under pressure from regulators who view privacy coins as inherently high-risk.
What this means for investors
For anyone holding USDT, this incident is a reminder that Tether’s centralized control over its stablecoin is both a feature and a risk. The same blacklisting capability that stopped $72 million from being laundered could theoretically be used to freeze any wallet for any reason.
The company managed to freeze $72 million, but only after roughly $48 million had already moved. Transactions on Tron finalize in seconds. Compliance teams, no matter how responsive, operate on human timescales.