Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has pushed back 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. In a post on X, Ardoino disputed the report's findings, putting the word “analysis” in quotation marks when describing Senator Richard Blumenthal's work.
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 wrote that since 2023, 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 and the minority staff of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It analyzed 846 wallets that OFAC or the NBCTF sanctioned or targeted for seizure and found that 84% transacted exclusively, or nearly exclusively, in USDT.
Delays are the subject of the report's third finding. After the NBCTF designated 39 wallets linked to a Hezbollah money launderer in June 2023, Tether froze only five of them for months and blocked the other 34 in March 2024, shortly before OFAC sanctioned the same launderer. The subcommittee's analysis showed that more than $34.6 million in USDT left those wallets after the seizure notice was published. Babak Zanjani, a sanctioned Iranian money launderer, posted Central Bank of Iran wallet addresses on X in December 2025, and Tether had not blacklisted them as of September, according to the report.
Three wallets tied to the Modex Exchange Company, a brokerage the report links to funding Iran's central bank, took in $575 million in USDT between April and June 2025, and Tether did not blacklist those either, the report said.
Nearly $5B Frozen
As CryptoPotato reported earlier, Tether said on September 28 that it had helped US authorities freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT this year, including more than $344 million across two addresses tied to the Central Bank of Iran in April. The company also reported freezing more than $22 million across over 40 cases referred by Israel's counter-terror financing bureau, and across all cases, the stablecoin issuer says it had helped freeze more than $4.9 billion, including over $2.4 billion connected to US authorities.
