US DOJ Seizes $52M in Tether (USDT) and Crypto From Xinbi Guarantee Network

DOJ Moves on Xinbi Guarantee

The United States Department of Justice has seized the infrastructure and digital-asset wallets operated by dapp-style brokerage service Xinbi Guarantee, freezing more than $52 million in cryptocurrency in an enforcement action confirmed on September 9. The Treasury describes Xinbi as a Chinese-language online platform built for cyber fraud, scams and money laundering, run through Telegram rather than any registered exchange. Per the Justice Department's own account of the takedown, the scheme supplied criminal organizations with tailored investment-fraud websites and money-laundering services, and was additionally involved in recruiting victims of human trafficking across Southeast Asia.

The seizure was surgical: authorities took control of the Xinbi Telegram channel and two crypto wallets holding roughly $12 million, while imposing usage restrictions on 47 additional wallets tied to the operation. Alongside the Justice Department's move, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the platform as a transnational criminal organization — a label that cuts off the operation from any contact with the US financial system or dollar-pegged assets. The stablecoin layer of the case had already been shut down in advance: Stable-style USDT settlement was blocked when Tether froze approximately $39.3 million USDT across ten Tron (TRX) addresses associated with Xinbi, demonstrating how quickly issuer-level controls can isolate tainted funds on a public chain.

Canary Launches Spot TRX ETF

On the institutional side of the same network, Canary Capital launched the first spot Tron exchange-traded fund on September 9, listing under the ticker TRXS. The product holds TRX directly and tracks the token's price, while a staking sleeve is designed to accumulate additional TRX by delegating a portion of the fund's holdings on the Tron network — a structure closer to liquid staking than to a passive price tracker, since the staked balance grows rather than sitting idle. Security for the delegated tokens rests with the network's validator set, the distributed operators — each running what is effectively a blockchain node — who process and finalize transactions. The launch gives regulated-market investors direct, custodied exposure to a chain whose main economic engine is stablecoin settlement, the very activity federal agencies spent the same day policing on its rails. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Enforcement Reach Extends On-Chain

Our reading of the two filings behind this story — the OFAC designation and the issuer's on-chain freeze record — is that stablecoin compliance tooling has become the sharpest instrument in crypto enforcement: $39.3 million USDT was immobilized at the token level before any court order surfaced, then folded into a $52 million-plus government seizure. COINOTAG's view is that issuers and chains hosting deep stablecoin liquidity will keep absorbing this dual role — settlement venue for institutions, chokepoint for investigators — and issuers that freeze quickly will remain regulators' preferred partners.