Tether said on September 28 that it has frozen approximately $550 million in USDT connected to Iran's Central Bank and associated sanctions-evasion networks, as part of a broader push by the US Department of the Treasury to cut off financing channels used by Iran's regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The stablecoin issuer said the wallets involved had been identified by US authorities as belonging to the Central Bank of Iran and networks used to evade sanctions. The action forms part of Operation Economic Outcast, an initiative announced last month by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
This is not the first time Tether has intervened in wallets tied to Iran. In April, the company froze more than $344 million in USDT held across two addresses. One day later, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control formally designated those same addresses as identifiers for the Central Bank of Iran, which Washington has sanctioned over its ties to the Quds Force of the IRGC and to Hezbollah.
In July, Tether froze a further 130 million USDT spread across four wallets on the TRON network, part of the same enforcement pattern targeting Iran-linked flows.
A wider enforcement pattern
Tether's Iran-related freezes sit within a much larger compliance operation. The company says it now cooperates with more than 340 security agencies across 67 countries, and that funds blocked globally in support of investigations exceed $4.9 billion.
Working with Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, Tether says it has frozen more than 22 million USDT across more than 40 separate cases. In September, joint work with the US Department of Justice led to the seizure of $52 million in funds linked to scam centers. A separate freeze tied to the sanctioned Russian exchange Garantex accounted for $23 million.
Tether has also built OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals list directly into its wallet-control protocols, a step the company says extends sanctions restrictions automatically to the secondary market rather than relying solely on case-by-case intervention.
Tether's chief executive, Paolo Ardoino, said public blockchains give authorities a level of visibility into the movement of funds that does not exist with cash. He added that the company freezes accounts when security agencies provide information they consider credible.
Why it matters for Europe
USDT remains the most widely used stablecoin on European trading venues and payment rails, and the scale of Tether's freezing capability underscores how closely the token's issuer is now integrated into US sanctions enforcement. For European exchanges, custodians and payment firms handling USDT, the episode is a reminder that transactions can be reversed or blocked at the issuer level when sanctioned entities are involved, regardless of where in the world a wallet holder is based.
