The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, has highlighted the T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU) as a leading model for public-private collaboration in combating illicit blockchain activity. The initiative, launched in September 2024 by TRON, Tether, and blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, has frozen over $300 million in criminal assets and monitored more than $3 billion in suspect transaction volume across five continents since its inception.
The FATF report emphasizes the unit's shift from traditional post-investigation asset recovery to real-time interdiction, enabling coordinated cross-border action with law enforcement. This recognition underscores TRON DAO's role as a major stablecoin settlement layer, with the network boasting over 358 million user accounts, 12 billion transactions, and $25 billion in total value locked (TVL) as of January 2026.
Concurrently, in a separate but related action demonstrating this enforcement capability, Tether has frozen $182 million worth of its USDT stablecoin on the TRON network. The freeze targeted wallets linked to known scams and is described as part of ongoing security actions. This move reframes stablecoin liquidity as conditional, highlighting the issuer's ability to intervene on-chain and creating operational considerations for exchanges, custodians, and payment processors handling TRON-based USDT.
