Tether CEO Rejects Senate Claims Over Iran-Linked USDT
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino pushed again on X towards a US Senate subcommittee report, dated September 28, that accuses the stablecoin issuer of being sluggish to freeze wallets tied to Iran and its proxies.
At concern is whether or not Tether freezes addresses forward of sanctions designations, as the manager claims, or behind them, because the report contends.
Tether Says It Freezes Early, While the Report Finds Delays
Ardoino put the phrase “evaluation” in citation marks when describing Senator Richard Blumenthal’s work. Since 2023, he wrote, Tether has frozen reported addresses a mean of 4 weeks earlier than formal designations by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF), and in 99% of instances it did so earlier than blockchain analytics agency Chainalysis labeled them.
The Tether chief additionally credited the corporate’s actions with a 94% decline in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes, which he attributed to “regulation enforcement partnerships.”
Titled “Tethered to Terrorism,” the report comes from Blumenthal and the minority employees of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It analyzed 846 wallets that OFAC or the NBCTF sanctioned or focused for seizure and located that 84% transacted completely, or practically completely, in USDT.
Delays are the topic of the report’s third discovering. After the NBCTF designated 39 wallets linked to a Hezbollah cash launderer in June 2023, Tether froze solely 5 of them for months and blocked the opposite 34 in March 2024, shortly earlier than OFAC sanctioned the identical launderer.
The subcommittee’s evaluation confirmed that greater than $34.6 million in USDT left these wallets after the seizure discover was printed. Babak Zanjani, a sanctioned Iranian cash launderer, posted Central Bank of Iran pockets addresses on X in December 2025, and Tether had not blacklisted them as of September, in line with the report.
Three wallets tied to the Modex Exchange Company, a brokerage the report hyperlinks to funding Iran’s central financial institution, took in $575 million in USDT between April and June 2025, and Tether didn’t blacklist these both.
Nearly $5B Frozen
As CryptoPotato reported earlier, Tether said on September 28 that it had helped US authorities freeze practically $550 million in Iran-linked USDT this yr, together with greater than $344 million throughout two addresses tied to the Central Bank of Iran in April.
The firm additionally reported freezing greater than $22 million throughout over 40 instances referred by Israel’s counter-terror financing bureau, and throughout all instances, the stablecoin issuer says it had helped freeze greater than $4.9 billion, together with over $2.4 billion related to US authorities.
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