Tether says freezes cut Iran-linked stablecoin volumes 94% in rebuttal to Senate probe
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says wallet freezes cut Iran-linked USDT volumes 94%, as the Senate subcommittee behind the Iran report also probes the company’s Cantor Fitzgerald relationship.
Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief executive, pushed back on October 19 against a Senate report accusing the stablecoin issuer of aiding Iran’s shadow banking network, saying in a post on X that the findings miss the freezes the company has made.
Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued the report on September 28, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal, the subcommittee’s top Democrat. It said Tether provided “a significant financial lifeline within Iran’s shadow banking network.”
Ardoino said in the post that since 2023 the company froze addresses on average four weeks before the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF) designated them, and before analytics firm Chainalysis labeled the same addresses 99% of the time. He wrote that the actions led to Iran-linked stablecoin volumes declining by 94%.
The rebuttal also carries dollar totals: Tether says it blocked roughly $550 million in USDT linked to Iran during 2026, with freezes in April and July together accounting for over $470 million of the blocked amount. Tether does not dispute the Senate finding that USDT dominated the 846 sanctioned Iran-linked wallets the report examined, 84% of which predominantly used the token. The fight comes as settlement volumes across the wider $33 trillion stablecoin market have shifted toward rivals.
The 94% and $550 million figures come with no published methodology, so readers can weigh them only against the Senate’s own data. Ardoino had already criticized the report’s process at DC Fintech Week on October 13, saying it was released to media before Tether could review it, and said in an interview that “I believe it’s important for the public also to hear our side of the story.”
The dispute carries political weight. Since the report, Blumenthal has been probing Tether’s relationship with its US financial partner Cantor Fitzgerald, which has close ties to the Trump administration, and Tether named Bo Hines, Trump’s former White House crypto adviser, as chief executive of its US division last fall. The fight lands in a wider regulatory season in Washington, where courts are already testing whether the OCC can charter crypto trusts at all.
