“Tether acts fast”: Ardoino challenges Senate Democrat’s Iran sanctions findings

Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino has rejected a Senate Democrat’s findings on the company’s Iran compliance. 

Senator Richard Blumenthal had asked the Treasury and Justice departments to investigate whether Tether broke sanctions law.

How is Tether linked to Iran?

Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, wrote on X today that the company froze flagged addresses an average of four weeks before the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing issued official designations.

He added that in 99% of cases, the company froze addresses before blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis applied labels to them and that Tether’s work has led to a 94% drop in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes.

Ardoino’s tweets are in response to a report released on September 28 by the Democratic staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations titled “Tethered to Terrorism.” Senator Richard Blumenthal is the top Democrat on that subcommittee.

Investigators looked at 846 crypto wallets that were either sanctioned or flagged for seizure because of ties to Iran and its proxies. The staff found that 84% of them moved money only, or almost only, in USDT, the stablecoin issued by Tether.

The report also pointed to a specific case involving 39 addresses that Israel’s counter-terror bureau linked in June 2023 to a Hezbollah money launderer. According to the report, Tether froze five of them early but left the other 34 untouched until March 2024. More than $34.6 million in USDT left those wallets after a seizure notice became public.

Blumenthal sent the findings to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Todd Blanche, asking them to check whether Tether broke sanctions law and anti-money-laundering rules.

The report also raised questions about Tether’s ties to the U.S. government. Cantor Fitzgerald, which was run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick until recently and is now controlled by his children, owns about 5% of Tether. Blumenthal pointed out this connection, asking whether Tether has faced loose oversight.

Tether has defended itself, saying it helped freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT in 2026, which includes more than $344 million across two addresses in April and over $130 million across four TRON wallets in July.

Ardoino also said that Tether has worked with authorities worldwide to freeze more than $4.9 billion in assets.

Why is the timing of Tether’s freezes so important?

Footnote 56 in the Senate report pointed out that Israeli orders sometimes became public weeks or months after they were signed, which means a wallet could have been officially designated long before anyone outside the government knew about it.

Ardoino says Tether froze wallets four weeks before the public designation, but if Israel signed the order months before making it public, then Tether’s freeze might have still come months after the order was signed.

Meanwhile, Cryptopolitan reported that federal pressure on Iran-linked crypto is still building. Treasury Secretary Bessent told reporters the United States could seize about $1 billion in Iran-linked cryptocurrency, which is nearly double what Tether says it blocked all year.