Tether says its freezes drove a 94% drop in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says his company’s address freezes have cut Iran-linked stablecoin transaction volumes by 94% since 2023. The timing matters. A Senate report recently named Tether’s USDT as the stablecoin of choice for sanctioned Iran-linked wallets, and Ardoino’s response amounts to this: yes, they used our token, and we are the reason they are using it a lot less. What Tether is claiming Ardoino made the announcement on October 19, 2026. He framed the drop as the result of a proactive compliance strategy, not a reactive one. His central argument concerns timing. According to Ardoino, Tether froze relevant addresses an average of four weeks before official sanctions arrived from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Israel’s NBCTF. The company also put a dollar figure on its efforts. Tether disclosed that it blocked approximately $550 million in USDT linked to Iran over the course of 2026. Most of that came in two large batches. Freezes in April and July together accounted for over $470 million of the total. Third-party data points in the same direction. Figures from TRM Labs show USDT’s share of on-chain volume in Iran-attributed wallets fell from...