Freeze Authority
Account model
A freeze authority is the account that can freeze any token account of a given SPL token mint, which stops its owner from transferring or selling the tokens in it until the account is thawed. It is optional. When the mint’s freeze authority is none, nobody can ever freeze that token’s accounts. A live freeze authority on a token you want to trade is a risk, because its holder can make your tokens unsellable.
Detailed explanation
The freeze authority is the second optional authority stored on an SPL token mint, next to the mint authority. Its holder can run FreezeAccount on any token account of that mint, which sets the account’s state to frozen. A frozen account cannot send or receive tokens. ThawAccount reverses it.
There are legitimate reasons to keep one. Some issuers of regulated assets hold a freeze authority on purpose so they can comply with legal orders. For an ordinary tradable token it is a red flag, because the same power can be used to trap buyers: they can buy, then find that they cannot sell.
Like the mint authority, it can be removed for good with SetAuthority set to none. The check is the same too. Read the mint account, which is 82 bytes long. The freeze authority is the last field, starting at byte 46: a four-byte option tag followed by a 32-byte public key. A zero tag means there is no freeze authority.
Trading bots treat the two authorities together. A rule that blocks tokens with a live mint authority and a live freeze authority removes two of the most common ways a new token can hurt a buyer. It does not remove the others, such as thin liquidity or a creator who holds most of the supply.
When you'll see this
You read it from getAccountInfo on a mint, in token-creation events, and in the filters of sniper and copy-trading bots, where it appears as a rule such as block_freeze_authority. Explorers and wallets show a warning when a token has one.
How NoLimitNodes uses this
Our token-creation stream lets a bot read both authorities as soon as a token exists. The sniper bots we build can skip any launch that still has one.
Related terms
- Mint Authority · The optional account allowed to mint more of an SPL token. When it is set to none, the supply is fixed forever.
- Bonding Curve · A deterministic price function used by Pump.fun and other launchpads to price tokens against virtual reserves.
- LP Token · A fungible SPL token that represents your share of an AMM pool, mintable on deposit and burnable on withdraw.
- Program Derived Address · A PDA. An off-curve address derived from seeds plus a program ID, signable only by the program that owns it.
- Slippage · The gap between the price you quoted and the price you actually got, set as a tolerance on every swap instruction.