Tether Freezes $131 Million in Iran-Linked Tron Wallets After OFAC Sanctions

Tether froze more than $131 million in USDT across four Tron addresses on Tuesday, after the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned wallets tied to Iran's Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the move on X, vowing the U.S. would "aggressively follow the money and deny the Iranian regime access" to illicit funds. The same round hit seven people linked to a weapons procurement network for Iran's armed forces, among them a Tehran-based drone parts supplier, a Nigerian intermediary, and Russian nationals tied to a Moscow aviation company.

Why Tether can pull the lever

USDT sits outside the banking system Iran was cut off from years ago, which is exactly why Tehran wanted it. It is also issued by a company. Tether mints the token, so Tether can blacklist an address at the software level and turn a balance into a number nobody can move. Iran legalized Bitcoin mining in 2019 and leaned on the dollar token to steady a rial in freefall and settle trade abroad. The workaround has a switch, and Washington knows who holds it.

The trail from Bitso

An on-chain analyst who posts as Specter flagged the four addresses before Bessent's announcement, tracing them to both the IRGC and the central bank. Most of the funds, per that analysis, had been withdrawn from DTC Pay, a payment service provider, and Bitso, a Latin American exchange, before landing in the wallets OFAC named. Tron transactions are permanent and public. That is the bargain Iran keeps making: escape correspondent banking, land on a ledger anyone can read.

TRM Labs' Ari Redford told Bloomberg in April that law enforcement can "track and trace the flow of funds to build cases" and potentially seize them when actors try to cash out at regulated exchanges, which have to comply with U.S. rules. He called the standoff between IRGC financial facilitators and national security agencies a cat and mouse game.

Operation Economic Fury's tally

Tuesday's freeze is one entry in a campaign the Treasury calls Operation Economic Fury. In April, Tether locked $344 million across two other Tron addresses tied to the central bank. By May, Bessent put the total Iranian crypto seized since the campaign began at roughly $1 billion. June brought sanctions on the country's four largest exchanges, including Nobitex, which by itself processed more than half of Iran's digital asset volume in 2025.

How big the pool actually is depends on who is counting. Chainalysis attributed nearly $8 billion in Iranian crypto volume in 2026; TRM puts it closer to $10 billion, with IRGC-associated addresses accounting for more than half of the country's inflows in that year's final quarter. Tether says it now works with more than 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries and has frozen upward of $4.4 billion since it started coordinating with them, more than $2.1 billion of that tied to U.S. enforcement actions. Against those figures, Tuesday's $131 million is a rounding error.