Note

The Compliance Policy Editor workflow is a new feature that will be available to all customers soon. Contact your Customer Success Manager to enable it in your Fireblocks workspace and for assistance with setting up the integration.

Overview

Auto Freeze allows you to set rules to automatically freeze an incoming transaction’s assets in your workspace for further review upon receiving funds from a suspicious sender. Fireblocks allows you to automatically freeze incoming transactions based on the default policy or a custom policy. You can also manually freeze an incoming transaction using the Freeze Transaction API endpoint.

For UTXO-based assets, Fireblocks marks the specific transaction's inputs as unspendable.
For account-based assets, Fireblocks marks the transaction's balance as unspendable. This means you can still use the rest of your wallet or vault account's balance for other transactions.

Auto Freeze can be used in conjunction with the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) integration, the Travel Rule integration, or both integrations. Auto Freeze can take place during the following transaction screening steps (in chronological order):

AML Transaction Screening Policy
Travel Rule Transaction Screening Policy
Travel Rule Post-Screening Policy

Once Auto Freeze takes place, the transaction does not continue to other steps in transaction screening. For example, if you have both AML and Travel Rule enabled and an incoming transaction is automatically frozen during the AML Transaction Screening Policy, the transaction does not proceed to Travel Rule transaction screening.

Automatic review using a screening policy

You can create a screening policy to freeze incoming transactions based on source and destination. Transactions that match these rules immediately change to the Rejected status.

Users assigned an Owner or Admin role can unfreeze these funds using the Fireblocks Console or the Fireblocks API.

Screening policy setup

Auto Freeze is a policy for incoming transactions that freezes certain funds by default. Contact Fireblocks Support to enable the Auto Freeze Policy in your workspace.

Select one of the three available templates when you open a support request:

Template A

Auto-freeze all transactions from external addresses only.

Incoming transactions are accepted if the source is a whitelisted address, a connected exchange account, a connected fiat account, a Fireblocks P2P Network connection, or the Gas Station.
Incoming transactions are frozen if the source is an unknown external address.

Template B

Auto Freeze all transactions from external addresses and whitelisted addresses.

Incoming transactions are accepted if the source is a connected exchange account, a connected fiat account, a Fireblocks P2P Network connection, or the Gas Station.
Incoming transactions are frozen if the source is an unknown external address or a whitelisted address.

Custom Template

Create a new policy using the first-match principle to either Pass or Freeze any incoming transaction. You can download a blank Autofreeze Policy template to create your custom policy.

Rule parameters

Parameter	Description
Source	The source can be specific (e.g. Binance #1 Exchange Account, etc.), a source sub-type (e.g. All Binance Accounts, etc.), a source type (e.g. All Exchanges, All External Addresses, etc.), or any/all sources (a subset of all external addresses and all exchanges depending on the supported source-destination pair). Only supported source-destination pairs are applied to your workspace.
Destination	The destination can be a specific vault account or All Vault Accounts.
Amount	Ability to match assets valued greater than the amount. The amount can be set to the current rate of an asset in USD or an asset's quantity.
Asset	Rules can be applied to specific assets or to include any asset supported by Fireblocks. Learn more about supported assets.
Action	Specifies whether to require screening: Freeze: The incoming transaction and its assets are frozen until manually unfrozen. Pass: The incoming transaction skips screening and is accepted, then immediately progresses to the next transaction status.

Reviewing frozen transactions and assets

You can review frozen funds via the Fireblocks Console or API.

Vault: Frozen assets are identified by the freeze icon.
Transaction History: Expand a transaction with a Rejected primary status to view the AUTO_FREEZE sub-status. AML providers like Elliptic or Chainalysis include values for risk score and risk category. However, automatically frozen transactions always display N/A for the risk score and risk category in the Fireblocks Console.
API: Asset status is returned with VaultAsset objects.

Manual review using the Fireblocks API

In addition to automatic screening, you can use the Fireblocks API to periodically review recently received transactions, check their source addresses, and use the freeze and unfreeze API functions to ensure these assets are not spent.

Learn more about freezing and unfreezing transactions using the API.

Unfreezing assets

Automatically frozen assets can be reviewed and unfrozen in your Transaction History or via the API. Learn more about unfreezing assets from rejected inbound transactions in the Fireblocks Console.

Assets frozen manually via the Fireblocks API can only be unfrozen via the API.