Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on October 19 that the company’s actions had cut Iran-linked stablecoin volumes by 94%, pushing back against a U.S. Senate investigation that found USDT was overwhelmingly used by a set of wallets sanctioned or targeted for seizure over Iranian links.
Ardoino also said Tether froze relevant addresses an average of four weeks before formal designations by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, and before Chainalysis applied labels in 99% of cases. The comments, reported by CoinDesk, framed the company’s recent enforcement activity as evidence that the Senate’s account did not reflect progress.
Tether cites a 94% decline as Senate scrutiny intensifies
The disagreement follows an investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into crypto activity connected to Iran. According to a release from Senator Richard Blumenthal, the inquiry examined 846 wallets that had been sanctioned or targeted for seizure because of Iranian links.
The Senate said 84% of those wallets transacted exclusively or nearly exclusively in USDT. That finding puts the dollar-pegged token at the centre of the committee’s concerns, even as Tether argues its intervention has materially reduced the volume of Iran-linked stablecoin activity.
Ardoino’s 94% figure refers to a reduction in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes, rather than the share of a selected set of wallets using USDT. The two claims therefore address different questions: one concerns activity levels over time, while the other describes the token used by wallets identified in the Senate review.
The Senate report focuses on past freezing failures and 846 wallets
The subcommittee’s criticism was not limited to the mix of assets used by the wallets. It accused Tether of failing to consistently freeze illicit wallets before 2024 and called on the Treasury and Justice departments to investigate the company’s anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance practices.
The Senate’s findings concern wallets that were already sanctioned or targeted for seizure because of Iranian connections. They do not, on their own, establish how much aggregate Iran-linked stablecoin volume remained after Tether’s more recent freezes, which is the metric invoked by Ardoino.
Still, the report places Tether’s enforcement record under sharper political scrutiny. Its request for Treasury and Justice to examine the company’s practices points to a potential next stage beyond the committee’s investigation.
Tether points to nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT freezes
Tether has separately said it supported the freezing of approximately $550 million in Iran-linked USDT during 2026. The company said that total included more than $344 million in April and over $130 million in July, according to its September 28 statement.
Those figures form the numerical basis for Tether’s broader case that its compliance response has become more active. Ardoino’s account goes further, maintaining that the company was acting ahead of public designations in most of the cases he referenced.
The company’s assertion that it acted before OFAC, Israel’s NBCTF and Chainalysis is consequential because it presents Tether as identifying and restricting addresses before external enforcement or analytics markers became public. The available statements do not provide a wallet-by-wallet account of those interventions.
Wallet usage and volume reduction measure different claims
The two figures measure different things. The Senate’s 84% statistic refers to the prevalence of USDT among 846 examined Iran-linked wallets; Tether’s claimed 94% decline refers to an asserted change in Iran-linked stablecoin volumes.
As FinanceFeeds reported, Tether has not publicly disclosed the methodology or underlying data supporting the 94% calculation. That means the company’s headline reduction cannot be independently matched against the Senate’s wallet sample using the information currently available.
The Senate’s 846-wallet finding nonetheless shows that USDT was the dominant asset within the addresses reviewed, while Tether’s freeze totals show the scale of the enforcement activity it says it has supported during 2026. Whether those actions produced the claimed volume reduction depends on data Tether has not released publicly.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.