Tether reports approximately $550 million in Iran-linked [ticker USDT] freezes

Tether says it froze approximately $550 million in Iran-linked USD₮ during 2026, across actions tied to the period when U.S. authorities broadened sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank and affiliated networks.

The April action was the bigger one. Tether says it worked alongside the Office of Foreign Assets Control and U.S. law enforcement to freeze more than $344 million spread across two addresses. OFAC formally added those same addresses as digital-currency identifiers for Iran’s Central Bank the following day. July brought a second round: after Treasury expanded the Central Bank of Iran designation to cover four additional TRON addresses, Tether froze more than $130 million across those four wallets. The fact sheet itemizes those two actions and gives an approximate 2026 total of $550 million; it does not establish that those are the only actions comprising that total. The roughly $76 million nominal gap between the itemized lower-bound figures and the approximate total may not represent a separate discrete freeze, given that both the itemized figures and the total are qualified.

Wallets identified in those actions are frozen; funds held in them cannot be moved.

CEO Paolo Ardoino made the blockchain-visibility argument explicitly. “Public blockchains provide authorities with a level of visibility into the movement of funds that simply does not exist with cash, and Tether can act when credible information is provided by law enforcement,” he wrote. He also wrote: “Tether has consistently demonstrated that USD₮ is not a haven for sanctioned actors, terrorist organizations or criminal networks.”

The company’s cumulative compliance numbers are large. It also says it froze more than $22 million across more than 40 cases referred by Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, touching more than 640 addresses. In September 2025, the NBCTF published 187 cryptocurrency addresses it attributed to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Elliptic later reported that 39 of those addresses had been blacklisted by Tether, freezing approximately $1.5 million in USD₮.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced “Operation Economic Outcast” in August 2026, explicitly aimed at cutting off financial networks supporting the Iranian regime and the IRGC. Tether’s publication slots both the April and July freezes into that campaign, and identifies digital assets as one of five sectors facing expanded sanctions exposure.

Then the Senate report hit — same day as Tether’s announcement. The September 28 report, as summarized by CoinDesk, came from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence. Senate Democrats called USDT “a significant financial lifeline” for Iran’s cryptocurrency-based shadow-banking network and alleged Tether had “repeatedly failed” to block Iran-connected wallets — sometimes taking weeks to respond, sometimes acknowledging requests without actually blacklisting the wallets involved. The report further alleged that before 2024, Tether didn’t consistently freeze wallets designated by counter-terrorism agencies and continued missing illicit wallets it should have caught on its own.

Tether’s response, also in its publication, is that its policy now aligns with the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals List and extends sanctions controls to secondary-market wallets listed there. It works with more than 340 law-enforcement agencies in 67 countries, the company says.