A major stablecoin issuer says it is outpacing official sanctions and analytics labels with proactive freezes on suspicious addresses.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says that since 2023 the firm froze addresses an average of four weeks before the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing formally flagged them as being linked to Iran.
He also says that the firm froze the reported addresses before Chainalysis labeled them Iran-linked 99% of the time.
According to Ardoino, these steps led to a 94% decline in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes.
The firm, which issues the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT, credits its law enforcement partnerships for enabling fast responses to new threats.
Ardoino’s comments come in response to recent criticism by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who led a probe into 846 wallets sanctioned by the U.S. and Israeli governments over Iran ties and found that 84% of them traded exclusively or almost exclusively in USDT.
Blumenthal told the Wall Street Journal that the probe “exposes how Tether and its flagship token have become central to Iran’s shadow banking system, allowing the Iranian government to fund its regional proxies, commit human-rights abuses, and pursue hostile drone and missile programs as they defy our sanctions regime.”
Tether’s USDT accounts for about 60% of all stablecoins by market capitalization.
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