Why we built this

Picture a supplier who emails you a TRON address and asks for 4,000 USDT. Before that money lands, three separate things can go wrong. A character in the address could be off. The address could belong to someone the US Treasury has sanctioned. Or Tether could have frozen it, in which case your USDT arrives and then never moves again.

All three can be checked in public data. The trouble is that the data lives in different places: the network’s own address rules, OFAC’s sanctions list and the USDT and USDC contracts themselves. So we put them on one page.

What each row means

Every check gets its own row, with its source beside it, and we never add the rows up into a score. Scores look tidy, but they bury the part you actually need: which check failed, and why.

Is the address typed correctly?

Most addresses carry their own error check, a bit like the last digit of a card number. The page decodes what you pasted and does that math again.

Bitcoin has three families. Old-style addresses that start with 1 or 3 use Base58Check, SegWit ones (bc1q) follow Bech32 from BIP 173, and Taproot ones (bc1p) follow Bech32m from BIP 350. Paste a SegWit version nobody uses yet and you’ll get a warning, since BIP 350 says no recipient should ever hand one out.

On Ethereum, and on every other EVM chain, an address is 0x followed by 40 hex characters. That mix of capital and small letters you often see is a checksum, defined in EIP-55, and its authors put the chance of a typo slipping through at 0.0247%, about one in 4,000. An address in all small letters (or all capitals) is still perfectly valid, though. There’s simply no checksum to test, and the page says so.

TRON addresses are 34 characters long and start with T. Under the hood that’s a 0x41 prefix byte plus 20 address bytes in Base58Check, as TRON’s developer documentation describes. The hex form beginning with 41 works too.

Solana has no checksum at all. Its addresses are 32-byte values written in Base58, so a typo can produce something that looks every bit as valid as the real thing. All the page can confirm there is the shape, which is why it asks you to compare the address character by character.

Which network is it on?

This one trips people up. A 0x address exists on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and every other EVM network at the same time, because, as MetaMask’s help center puts it, one recovery phrase gives you the same address on all of them.

That’s convenient for wallets and risky for deposits, because an exchange may never see a payment that arrives on a network it doesn’t support. The page reminds you to send on the network the recipient asked for.

Older Bitcoin formats (starting with 1 or 3) are shared with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. OFAC itself lists some addresses of this kind under both tickers. If you’re paying in bitcoin, make sure the other side means bitcoin too.

Is it on the US sanctions list?

Every digital currency address on the US Treasury’s main sanctions list is built into the page. That list is the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and we take it from OFAC’s official SDN download in its advanced XML format. Because the list ships with the page, your lookup never leaves the browser.

The copy in use is the one OFAC published on 2026-11-06: 1,064 unique crypto addresses across 113 SDN entries. Count them per ticker and you get 1,080 listings, because some addresses appear under more than one.

Matching is exact. Case is ignored for EVM addresses, where capitals only carry the EIP-55 checksum, and for bc1 addresses, which BIP 173 makes case-insensitive. Any other format has to match character for character. On a hit, you’ll see the entry name, the ticker OFAC used, the sanctions program and a link to the entry on OFAC’s Sanctions List Search.

Has the issuer frozen it?

Tether and Circle can freeze an address from inside their stablecoin contracts. So for any valid EVM or TRON address, the page goes and asks those contracts on the live chain.

On Ethereum, the USDT question is isBlackListed(address), sent to Tether’s contract at 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7. We read Tether’s verified source code and found a catch: a frozen address can’t send, but nothing stops anyone sending to it. USDT you send there arrives and is stuck.

Circle’s USDC contract on Ethereum (0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48) answers isBlacklisted(address), spelled with a lowercase l, and its code blocks both directions, so a payment to a frozen address just fails. Circle also issues USDC on Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, with a separate freeze list on each contract, and the page checks all three.

USDT on TRON (contract TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t) has the same isBlackListed(address) call as on Ethereum. We simulated transfers with a frozen address on TRON: sending from it failed, while transfers into it went through.

Public nodes sometimes don’t answer. When that happens you’ll see “could not check right now” and a retry button. A failed check never shows up as a clean one.

What’s in the wallet right now?

Every valid address gets one more look: what it holds right now. That means ETH, USDT and USDC on Ethereum, TRX and USDT on TRON, BTC on Bitcoin, and SOL, USDC and USDT on Solana. A 0x address also gets its balances on BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, and wherever a price is available you see the dollar value next to the amount.

Next to the balance you get a bit of history. An Ethereum wallet shows how many transactions it has ever sent, a Bitcoin address shows its transaction count and the date of the latest one, a Solana wallet shows its latest transaction and a TRON address shows the day its account was created.

If what you pasted turns out to be a smart contract, a Solana program or a token account rather than a wallet with a private key behind it, the page says so.

We kept all of that out of the verdict on purpose. Plenty of honest people have empty wallets, and scammers sometimes sit on big ones. Where it helps is a story that doesn’t add up: a supplier who says they’ve traded for ten years, asking to be paid at an address that has never sent anything.

A few limits apply. Ethereum balances cover mainnet only, so the same 0x address may hold more on Base, Arbitrum or another EVM network. On Bitcoin the balance is for one address, while a wallet usually spreads its coins across many (the next paragraph is about finding some of the others). On Solana, USDC and USDT come from the wallet’s standard token accounts, the ones wallets create by default.

Bitcoin addresses get an extra step. When a wallet pays from several of its addresses at once, every one of them signs that single transaction, which ties them to one owner. The page reads up to 250 of the address’s latest transactions looking for that pattern. Whatever it finds, up to 20 addresses, shows up with a balance next to each.

Every one is also run against the OFAC list, and a single hit there is enough for a “Do not send” verdict. Treat it as a strong hint, not proof. The rule has a known exception, CoinJoin, where strangers deliberately pay together, and we skip anything shaped like one. And most addresses people hand out for a payment have never spent anything, so for them the list stays empty.

What a clean result doesn’t tell you

There’s no risk score here, on purpose. Each row is one fact with its source, and none of them says who controls the address or whether the person asking for money is honest. An address can pass every check and still belong to a scammer.

Some gaps are worth knowing about:

Address poisoning isn’t detected yet. That’s the trick where a look-alike address gets planted in your transaction history, so compare the whole address, not only its first and last characters.
Only OFAC’s SDN list is covered. Other OFAC lists and other countries’ sanctions lists aren’t, and OFAC itself warns that its digital currency address listings are not likely to be exhaustive.
The freeze check reads USDT on Ethereum and TRON, and USDC on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. USDT on BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base isn’t issued by Tether itself, and USDC and USDT on Solana work differently, so none of those are checked.

This isn’t a compliance screening service, legal advice or a Travel Rule check, and it doesn’t pass sender or recipient details to anyone.

Privacy

Everything starts in your browser. The format check and the sanctions match run on this page, since the OFAC list is part of it. What you paste isn’t sent to thecryptoeconomy.com, and it isn’t added to the page address either. The “Copy link” button puts the address after a # in the link; browsers never send that part to a server, and our analytics doesn’t record it.

The freeze and balance checks are the only parts that touch the network, and only for an address that passes the format check. Each network gets a public service, plus a second one in case the first is down.

Network	Asked first	Backup	What it’s asked for
Ethereum	`ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com`	`eth.drpc.org`	balance, transaction count, the USDT and USDC contracts
BNB Chain	`bsc-rpc.publicnode.com`	`bsc-dataseed.bnbchain.org`	BNB balance
Polygon	`polygon-bor-rpc.publicnode.com`	`polygon.drpc.org`	balances, the USDC contract
Arbitrum	`arbitrum-one-rpc.publicnode.com`	`arb1.arbitrum.io`	balances, the USDC contract
Base	`base-rpc.publicnode.com`	`mainnet.base.org`	balances, the USDC contract
TRON	`api.trongrid.io`	`tron-rpc.publicnode.com`	account record, the USDT contract
Bitcoin	`mempool.space`	`blockstream.info`	balance, transaction history
Solana	`solana-rpc.publicnode.com`	`api.mainnet-beta.solana.com`	balance, token accounts, latest transaction

Dollar values come from Coinbase’s public exchange rates, with CoinGecko filling in TRX. Those requests ask for coin prices only and carry no address. That list is the whole list.

We picked public services that need no account, but they’re still other people’s servers. They see the address you check and your IP address, and their privacy policies apply, not ours.

What we could control, we did: requests leave without cookies or a referrer, an address that fails the format check is never sent, and if you paste something that looks like a private key or a recovery phrase, the page warns you, wipes the field and sends nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Does “not on the list” mean the address is safe?

No, and OFAC says as much: its digital currency address listings are not likely to be exhaustive. Plenty of scam addresses never land on any list. Treat a clean result as one fact, and before paying, call or message the recipient somewhere you already know is theirs and read the address back to them.

Why does a 0x address show so many networks?

EVM networks all use the same address format, and one recovery phrase gives you the same 0x address on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and the rest. Paid on the wrong network? With a self-custody wallet, switch to that network and the money is usually there. Sent to an exchange deposit address or a smart contract, it may never be credited, and getting it back isn’t guaranteed.

What does “frozen” mean for USDT and USDC?

The issuer has put the address on a blacklist inside the token contract. With USDT, on Ethereum and on TRON, the address can’t send, but USDT sent to it still arrives and then sits there. With USDC, on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, the address can neither send nor receive, so your payment fails. Other tokens and the network’s own coin aren’t affected.

Why does it sometimes say “could not check right now”?

It happens more than we’d like. Free public nodes cap how many requests they take, and now and then one goes down. The page tries a second node before giving up, and if that fails too it tells you, because a guess here could pass for a clean result. Give it a minute.

In a hurry? Open the USDT or USDC contract on Etherscan or Tronscan, go to Read Contract and paste the address into isBlackListed or isBlacklisted yourself.

How current is the sanctions data, and how can I confirm a match?

The date of the OFAC list sits right under the search box (2026-11-06 in this version). To confirm a hit or look for newer changes, search the address on OFAC’s Sanctions List Search. OFAC’s guidance is to enter a digital currency address in the “ID #” field. Each match on this page also links straight to its OFAC entry.