Báo cáo của ZachXBT: Circle không tuân thủ quy định trong nhiều sự việc, liên quan đến hơn 420 triệu USD

The Huoxing Finance report states that on April 3, blockchain investigator ZachXBT released an investigation report targeting Circle, alleging that since 2022, the company has exhibited "inadequate compliance enforcement" in multiple incidents involving illicit funds, with a cumulative amount exceeding $420 million. The report notes that as the issuer of USDC, Circle has long been regarded as regulated and possessing a robust compliance framework, with its token contract featuring functionalities to freeze and blacklist addresses, and explicitly reserving the right to restrict suspicious accounts in its terms of service. However, these mechanisms were not timely or effectively utilized during multiple major security incidents. The report highlights the April 1, 2026, attack on Drift Protocol, during which approximately $280 million in assets were stolen. The attacker used Circle’s proprietary cross-chain bridge, CCTP, to transfer over $232 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum within six hours, with no assets frozen during this period. Similar scenarios occurred in attacks on SwapNet, Cetus Protocol, and Mango Markets. In some cases, even after law enforcement agencies and industry experts issued freeze requests, Circle failed to act promptly and only took action after the assets had already been transferred. Additionally, the report points out that in investigations involving money laundering by the Lazarus Group, Circle’s response was significantly slower compared to other stablecoin issuers such as Tether and Paxos. In certain cases, freeze operations were delayed by several months. Similar delays were observed in the Ledger supply chain attack and the GMX attack, where USDC remained unblocked at suspicious addresses for hours or longer. ZachXBT stated in the report that this disclosure is not intended to negate the value of Circle’s product or its stablecoin itself, but rather emphasizes that its compliance enforcement decisions have caused "real and significant losses" to the industry. He noted that over the past three years, due to repeated failures to act promptly, the DeFi ecosystem has suffered cumulative losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with the $420 million figure being a conservative estimate of disclosed cases—the actual scale may be even higher.