94 percent. That is the fall in Iran-linked stablecoin volume that Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino claimed in a post on X, CoinDesk reported on 19 October.
It is a reply to Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Subcommittee Democrats issued a report dated 28 September saying Tether gave Iran’s shadow banking network a significant financial lifeline.
The report said that before 2024 Tether did not comprehensively freeze flagged wallets, which invited abuse. It also cited Hamas shifting from bitcoin and other coins to promoting USDT.
Ardoino says that since 2023 Tether has frozen suspicious addresses about four weeks, on average, before the US Treasury’s OFAC or Israel’s counter-terror financing bureau formally sanctioned them. He says it froze the reported addresses before Chainalysis labelled them in 99 percent of cases. At DC Fintech Week he also complained that the report reached the media before Tether could review it.
CoinDesk did not independently verify any of this, and the 94 percent has no baseline attached. Ardoino says bad actors are moving to channels outside US control, and that the work is not finished.
Blumenthal is separately examining Tether’s relationship with Cantor Fitzgerald, which has close ties to the Trump administration. Tether named Bo Hines, a former White House crypto adviser, to run its US arm last autumn.
The politics may matter more than the data. Kalshi odds of Democrats retaking the Senate are rising, which would give Blumenthal far greater investigative powers over crypto. The open question is whether Tether publishes the numbers behind its claims before then.
