How long from a freeze proposal to a USDT freeze?

Updated 13 November 2026

Half of all USDT freezes on TRON execute within 9.7 minutes of the freeze proposal appearing on-chain. But 30% wait more than an hour, and the longest window was 167 hours, almost seven days. This is FreezeCheck data for all 4,199 addresses frozen from November 2025 to November 2026.

9.7 minmedian time from public proposal to freeze

30%of freezes waited more than an hour to execute

167 hlongest window

All figures on this page are FreezeCheck data: the signing-window study; per-freeze data with transaction hashes is open as CSV.

Distribution

Window from proposal to freeze	Freezes	Share
Over an hour	1,257	30%
Over 6 hours	338	8%
Over a day	35	0.8%
Longest	167 hours

4,199 addresses in total. Shares are of that number.

Why there is a gap between proposal and freeze

The USDT contract on TRON is owned by a 2-of-3 multisig wallet. To freeze an address, one owner sends a proposal transaction (submitTransaction, with an addBlackList call inside). It is public at once and the target address can be read from it. The freeze takes effect only when a second owner confirms the proposal (confirmTransaction). The gap between the two signatures is the window.

What happens inside the window

Until the second signature lands, the address can still send USDT. According to FreezeCheck data, 219 addresses moved 65.4 million USDT out inside the window. In an interval of the same length right before the proposal the same addresses sent 27.9 million, so outflows in the window were 2.3 times higher. The largest case: 15.2 million USDT in a single transfer 5 minutes after the proposal and 64 minutes before the freeze.

And how long from a dirty transfer to a freeze?

That is a different gap and a much longer one: days, sometimes weeks. The victim files a report, an exchange or analysts trace the chain, the request reaches Tether. In that time the money passes through several addresses, so a freeze often lands not on the thief but on whoever accepted the money later: why USDT gets frozen.

What it means in practice

If you accept USDT. A counterparty's address can be frozen minutes after a deal. Check the risk before payment: on wallets Tether froze later, the bot had already shown 🟡 or 🔴 in 82% of cases (blind test on October freezes).
Exchanges and payment services. A payout to an address already on the blacklist gets stuck: 104.2 million USDT was sent to 982 frozen addresses in a year. Checking the address before a payout prevents that.
If you watch addresses. The “Watch” button in @freezecheck_bot tells you when an address lands on the Tether blacklist.

Questions and answers

Can a USDT freeze be seen before it takes effect?

Yes. A freeze proposal is an ordinary public transaction on TRON with the target address in it. According to FreezeCheck data, the median time between it and the freeze is 9.7 minutes, and in 30% of cases it is over an hour.

How fast does Tether freeze an address?

After the public proposal, within minutes: the median is 9.7 minutes. From the dirty transfer itself to the freeze it usually takes days or weeks.

Where do these figures come from?

FreezeCheck collected all 4,221 freeze events in the USDT contract from 4 November 2025 to 7 November 2026 and matched each to its multisig proposal transaction. The method and CSV are on the study page.

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