Comparison of Centralization Levels of USD1, USDT, and USDC Stablecoins - USDC can freeze, USDT can be destroyed, and USD1 can be directly transferred away I read Justin's tweet this morning and I'm not very interested in their lawsuit, but there is a sentence in Justin's article that really sparked my interest, which is about the possibility of a backdoor in Solana: USD1tgGY1N17NEEHLmeLoaybftRBUSErhqYiQzvEmuB. In fact, if it refers to freezing assets, not only USD1 has this function, but other USDT and USDC also have it. Although it is not decentralized enough, this is also a good thing for the cryptocurrency circle with frequent black forests. So I was very interested and made a comparison, comparing the smart contracts of USD1, USDT, and USDC together, to see to what extent the three stablecoin issuers can achieve "risk control" on user assets. The authority of USDC is relatively the most restrained. Circle can add an address to the blacklist. Once added, the address can no longer send or receive USDC, and Circle can also suspend the entire USDC contract. But currently, the USDC contract does not provide an administrator function that can directly transfer USDC from a blacklist address, nor does it have the destroyBlackFunds like USDT that can directly destroy all balances of the blacklist address. However, USDC itself is an upgradable contract, and Circle controls Proxy Admin, which can be implemented with new contracts. Therefore, what is said here is only what the current version can do, and does not mean that Circle will never have the ability to increase these permissions. 2. The authority of USDT is further enhanced. In addition to being able to freeze any USDT address through addBlackList, Tether also has a very direct destroyBlackFunds feature. After an address is blacklisted, Tether can call this function to directly reset the USDT balance of that address to zero and deduct it from the total supply of USDT. So even if 10 million USDT is kept in one's own cold wallet, the private key will always be known only to oneself. As long as Tether puts this address on the blacklist, the USDT on the chain can still be frozen and even destroyed later. The permissions for USD1 are slightly different. USD1 also has administrator privileges such as freezing, unfreezing, pausing, issuing, and destroying, but there are two very sensitive functions in the V2 contract currently running: drain, reallocate, and drain. After an address is frozen, all USD1 in that address can be transferred to an administrator controlled address. Reallocate can directly reallocate USD1 from a frozen address to another address. So if a wallet has 10 million USD1, the administrator's permissions do not stop at temporarily disabling this 10 million. But after meeting the contract permission conditions, the 10 million USD1 can be directly transferred from the original wallet or reassigned to other addresses. Put three together, it's probably: USDC: Freeze USDT: Freeze+Destroy USD1: Freeze+Transfer+reallocate Of course, these three are all centralized stablecoins, and USDT and USDC have never promised to resist censorship, so there is nothing special about USD1 having administrator privileges. The special feature of USD1 is that it provides a very complete follow-up disposal function for frozen user balances. Administrators do not need user signatures or obtain user private keys to change the final ownership of USD1 at the smart contract level. To put it bluntly, the highest permission for USD1 is the ability to transfer USD1 from an account to one's own or someone else's wallet without the user's permission. Whether it's a cold wallet or a multi signature wallet, there's no way to prevent it. As for Justin's "backdoor", I think it needs to be distinguished. If backdoor refers to developers secretly hiding a piece of malicious code that no one knows, there is currently no evidence to prove the existence of such backdoor in USD1. Freeze, draft, and locate can all be seen in the public contract. But if the backdoor that everyone is talking about is that the money is clearly stored in their own on chain wallet, and the private key is only controlled by themselves, the issuer still retains a special set of administrator privileges that can freeze or even redistribute these assets. That USD1 does indeed have such a mechanism. Of course, saying this does not mean that USD1 will transfer user assets without reason, nor does it mean that USD1 deliberately conceals it. After all, the code is in the contract, which can be considered as a kind of "adjustment" that does exist although it is not explained in detail. And when I was adjusting my schedule, I discovered a more critical issue, which is: The USD1 source code displayed on the official GitHub of World Liberty is not the actual code executed by USD1 online. The official GitHub of World Liberty currently does not have the USD1 source code for drain and reallocation, but the actual USD1 running after the upgrade in April 2026, StablecoinV2, can already perform drain and reallocation on frozen balances and has these two permissions. So if some friends only look at the official GitHub, they will underestimate the current centralized control permissions of USD1. @Gate Crypto、 US stocks, Hong Kong stocks, South Korean stocks, gold CFD、 Predicting one-stop trading in the market