Tether CEO Rejects Senate Claims Over Iran-Linked USDT

Three wallets tied to a brokerage took in $575 million in USDT in spring 2025, and the Senate report says Tether did not freeze any of them. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino pushed back on X against a US Senate subcommittee report, dated September 28, that accuses the stablecoin issuer of being slow to freeze wallets tied to Iran and its proxies. At issue is whether Tether freezes addresses ahead of sanctions designations, as the executive claims, or behind them, as the report contends. Tether Says It Freezes Early, While the Report Finds Delays Ardoino put the word “analysis” in quotation marks when describing Senator Richard Blumenthal’s work. Since 2023, he wrote, Tether has frozen reported addresses an average of four weeks before 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 cases it did so before blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis labeled them. The Tether chief also credited the company’s actions with a 94% decline in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes, which he attributed to “law enforcement partnerships.” Titled “Tethered to Terrorism,” the report comes from Blumenthal...