Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on October 19 that the company’s wallet freezes caused Iran-linked stablecoin volumes to fall 94%, in a public rebuttal of a Senate report that accused the firm of anchoring Iran’s shadow banking network.
Ardoino said in a post on X that since 2023 Tether froze flagged addresses on average four weeks before the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing designated them, and before Chainalysis applied its labels in 99% of cases.
“Tether actions led to Iran-linked stablecoin volumes declining by 94%,” Ardoino wrote, adding that the company moves fast on new threats through its partnerships with law enforcement.
The number nobody can check
The 94% figure is Tether’s own. The company has published no methodology for it, and the claim arrives as Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, presses a report published September 28 that examined 846 sanctioned wallets with Iranian links and found 84% of them predominantly held USDT, Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Tether is not disputing that wallet finding. The company says it blocked roughly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT during 2026, with more than $470 million of that frozen in April and July alone. Independent figures from blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs show USDT’s share of on-chain volume in Iran-attributed wallets fell from 67% in 2025 to 14% in August 2026, a shift that could support either side’s case.
Where the flows went
The displacement question is the one neither the Senate report nor Tether’s rebuttal answers. If USDT’s share of Iran-attributed volume really collapsed from two-thirds to a sliver, the sanctioned activity did not vanish; it moved somewhere harder to see. Ardoino himself conceded the point. “Those bad actors are moving to other means that are outside of the control of the United States, and now outside of our control,” he said in an interview.
That is the same dynamic the Senate report flagged in reverse. It said weak deterrence had earlier pushed groups such as Hamas from bitcoin toward promoting USDT. A drop in Tether’s Iran-linked volume, taken on its own, does not show the activity stopped, only that it found a different rail. Nobody in the dispute has said where.
For the largest stablecoin issuer, the stakes go beyond one Senate report. Blumenthal has also been probing Tether’s relationship with its U.S. financial partner Cantor Fitzgerald, and the September findings prompted calls for investigations into whether Tether complied with sanctions and anti-money laundering rules. Ardoino, who spoke at DC Fintech Week on October 13, has criticized the report being released to media before Tether could review it, and said he posted the rebuttal so the public could hear the company’s side.
