Tether has frozen $4.9bn all told, and half of it for US agencies

Tether has frozen $4.9bn of assets across its lifetime and says $2.4bn of that came at the request of US authorities. The company put the numbers out a day after a Senate subcommittee named USDT as the payment rail of choice for sanctioned Iranian wallets, and the figures are larger than most of the people arguing about them assume.

“The DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, HSI, OFAC and authorities around the world have repeatedly worked with Tether to trace, freeze and recover assets.”

— Paolo Ardoino, Tether

Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of Tether

The compliance record, as the company states it:

• $4.9bn of assets frozen over the company's lifetime.
• $2.4bn of that connected to US authorities, which is 49% of the total.
• $550m frozen this year alone, or 11.2% of everything ever frozen.
• $344m of that in April, linked to the Central Bank of Iran.
• $130m across four wallets, an average of $32.5m each.

Two of those lines do arithmetic the press release does not. Just under half of everything Tether has ever frozen, 49%, was frozen for American agencies, which makes a private issuer in El Salvador one of the more productive instruments of US financial enforcement. And 11.2% of all the frozen USDT the company has ever reported was frozen in the past nine months, which says the pace is accelerating rather than the balance sheet being old.

Four wallets, $32.5m each

The $130m line is the one to sit with. It covers four wallets, an average of $32.5m each, and it tells you what freezing actually is: a surgical act against specific addresses that somebody has already identified. The subcommittee counted 846 wallets. Enforcement works one address at a time while the network it is policing operates three orders of magnitude wider, and that gap is the whole argument, not the $550m.

The story also moved while the numbers were being published. Senator Richard Blumenthal has asked the Treasury and the Justice Department to investigate potential sanctions violations off the back of the report, which turns a subcommittee document into a referral. Yesterday this was a finding. Today it is a request for two departments to open files, and the 84% figure is the thing they would be opening them about.

What freezing cannot reach

What Tether is defending is worth stating plainly, because it is a real argument and not a deflection. Dollars on a public ledger can be traced, frozen and returned. Dollars in a shadow bank cannot. The list of agencies Ardoino names is long and specific, and the $2.4bn is the receipt. The limitation is equally plain: every one of those freezes happened after the money moved.

Which is why the contrast with this week's other story matters. When Bitget lost $388m, its chief executive noted that THORChain cannot blacklist individual addresses because nobody controls it. Tether can freeze because somebody does. Whether that is a feature or a flaw depends entirely on which of those two desks you are sitting behind, and the Senate and the company have now both filed their answer.

Informational only, not investment advice. The freeze totals are Tether's own figures, the wallet counts are the subcommittee's, and neither side has published a list of addresses.