Tether freezes four Tron addresses holding 131 million USDT after a U.S. Treasury request

Tether blocked four wallets on the Tron network containing 131 million USDT at the request of the U.S. Treasury, Scott Bessent said. For PSPs and crypto payment teams, the point is simple: when OFAC connects addresses to sanctioned actors, stablecoin infrastructure can be turned off at the wallet level, not just at the exchange level.

1. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) linked the four addresses to Iran’s central bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to the senior official. Bessent said the freeze is part of a program called Economic Fury, aimed at limiting Iran’s access to the international financial system, including through digital assets.
2. Bessent also said the United States will keep targeting the use of cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions, finance military programs, and support organizations designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. That matters for high-risk processors because sanction exposure is not limited to fiat rails anymore; it now follows on-chain flows as well.
3. Analysts from the Specter team said a significant share of the funds from the four frozen addresses moved through the Singapore-based payment provider DTC Pay and the Latin American crypto exchange Bitso. For anyone screening merchant flow, that is the operational detail worth noting: sanctioned-linked value can travel through multiple intermediaries before it lands on a wallet a stablecoin issuer can still freeze.
4. This was not Tether’s first action of this kind. Earlier, Tether froze USDT on 131 Tron addresses after OFAC added those wallets to the sanctions list over links to the ISIS-K terrorist group. In practice, the pattern is the same: once OFAC names the addresses, the issuer can immobilize the tokens without waiting for an exchange to do the cleaning up.