Tether: stablecoin volume linked to the Islamic Republic fell 94 percent

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, claimed in a post on X on Monday, 19 October 2026, that the company's blocking of addresses linked to the Islamic Republic has cut the volume of stablecoin transactions linked to the government by 94 percent. The claim is a response to a report by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that put Tether (USDT) at the centre of the Islamic Republic's shadow banking network for evading sanctions.

Ardoino wrote that the analysis by Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator and ranking member of the subcommittee, overlooked the fact that since 2023 Tether has blocked these addresses on average four weeks before sanctions were announced by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing. Tether has not, however, published the data behind the 94 percent figure and has not made clear over what period or against what baseline the decline was measured; the claim therefore cannot be independently verified.

Senate report on Tether and Islamic Republic sanctions

The report “Tied to Terrorism”, which Democratic experts on the Senate investigations subcommittee published on 28 September, examined 846 wallets that were sanctioned or targeted for seizure between May–June 2021 and July–August 2026 because of links to the Islamic Republic and its proxy groups. According to the report, 84 percent of these wallets transacted only or almost only in Tether. Blumenthal has sent the findings to the US Treasury and Justice Departments for review.

The Senate report accepts that since late 2023 Tether has responded to sanctions “in some cases”, but calls this effort inconsistent and intermittent. An example cited in the report is the case of Tawfiq Muhammad Saeed al-Law, a financier of Lebanon's Hezbollah: in May–June 2023 Israel identified 39 wallets linked to him, but Tether blocked only five, and the other 34 wallets stayed open until February–March 2024; in that time more than $34.6 million in Tether left those wallets.

$550 million of government-linked assets blocked

At the same time as the Senate report was published, Tether had announced that in 2026 it had helped block nearly $550 million in Tether linked to the Islamic Republic, including more than $344 million in two addresses in March–April, which the blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs called the first wallets of the Islamic Republic's central bank to have been sanctioned by OFAC, and more than $130 million in four wallets in June–July.

TRM Labs estimates show that total cryptocurrency transaction volume in Iran fell from about $11.4 billion in 2024 to about $10 billion in 2025, a decline of about 12 percent. A 94 percent decline, as claimed by Tether, would be consistent with this trend only if a large part of the government's money flow has moved to assets and platforms that Tether has no power to block.

To evade sanctions and finance proxy groups, the Islamic Republic has relied on a network of cryptocurrency wallets that is now under the scrutiny of the US Senate.