tethe

The issuer of the stablecoin USDT, Tether, stated on September 28 that actions involving USDT in 2026 have frozen approximately $550 million, with the related wallets identified by U.S. authorities as being associated with the Central Bank of Iran and the Iranian sanctions network. Tether claimed that its cooperation with U.S. and international authorities has supported over 2,900 investigations globally, with more than 1,600 involving U.S. law enforcement agencies.According to Tether, in April 2026, it assisted in freezing over $344 million USDT across two addresses based on information provided by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and U.S. law enforcement agencies. The next day, OFAC listed these addresses as digital currency identifiers of the Central Bank of Iran, with the sanctions entry associated with the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah. In July 2026, the Treasury expanded the designated scope to four additional TRON addresses, with over $130 million USDT frozen across the four wallets.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that USDT is not a safe haven for sanctioned actors, terrorist organizations, or criminal networks, and that public blockchains allow authorities to see the flow of funds, enabling Tether to take action when law enforcement provides credible information. Tether also mentioned that it collaborates with over 340 law enforcement agencies in 67 countries, and its wallet freezing policy has been aligned with the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list.

A survey by the Democratic Party of the U.S. Senate claims that the stablecoin USDT issued by Tether has become a major payment method for Iran. The survey shows that among over 800 sanctioned cryptocurrency wallets, about 84% primarily or exclusively use USDT.The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had previously stated that its review of blockchain records, sanctions lists, and asset seizure notices found that the sanctioned wallets are mainly distributed across the Tron and Ethereum networks and have conducted USDT transactions.

According to official news, Tether announced a partnership with the fintech company Shiga to utilize its open-source Wallet Development Kit (WDK) to launch self-custody financial products for individuals and institutions in Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.The two parties will launch two core products: the self-custody wallet ENTA for individuals and businesses, which supports deposits in fiat currency or Bitcoin, and holds and transfers Tether (USDT), Bitcoin, and Tether Gold (XAUT); and the infrastructure Pulse for banks and financial institutions, aimed at assisting institutions in customizing digital asset services for specific payment channels and fund settlement processes, and supporting institutions in deploying in a private environment to retain key control.In addition, Shiga is currently completing the final approval process for the digital asset license in Nigeria, and once approved, will conduct compliant digital asset trading, brokerage, and custody services in the country.

According to informed sources, the Trump administration is considering launching an overseas stablecoin program, which may take the form of a joint venture with private enterprises. The Department of the Treasury, the State Department, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) may all participate to expand the use of the U.S. dollar and support demand for U.S. Treasury bonds.Tether's latest reserve report shows that as of June 30, it directly holds $11.496 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds, with total reserve assets of $18.775 billion, exceeding liabilities by $4.11 billion. The plan has not yet established a partnership with Tether and has not yet become an officially operational project.

According to CoinDesk, the stablecoin issuer Tether stated that its assets held in the licensed digital bank EQIBank in Dominica account for less than 0.034% of the group's total assets. Based on Tether's disclosed total group assets of $18.775 billion in June, its related exposure is approximately $64 million, but Tether did not disclose the specific amount.It was reported that EQIBank processes customer funds through the U.S. payment processor Capstone, which utilizes accounts at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan for fund transfers. U.S. prosecutors have seized funds related to Capstone's accounts and filed a civil forfeiture lawsuit, accusing it of making false representations about its business to the bank. EQIBank stated that approximately $89 million in funds have been seized, equivalent to about 80% of its monetary assets, which may expose it to liquidation risks.Previously, EQIBank provided banking services to Tether, including processing wire transfers related to the purchase and redemption of USDT. Tether stated that it is not aware of the actions related to Capstone as alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to on-chain data, Tether has successfully frozen 218,000 USDT in the stolen address from Bitget, which is a "three-hop" associated address of the initial stolen address from Bitget. This address remained inactive for over 2.5 hours after being discovered.Crypto KOL tanuki42 initiated a tracking of "Circle vs Tether" at that time and asked which of the two companies would freeze the related assets first.Currently, Circle has frozen the related stolen assets 7 hours and 18 minutes earlier than Tether.

According to on-chain analyst tanuki42, the address 0xe07 holds 100,000 USDC and 218,000 USDT, which come from the initial address of stolen funds from Bitget. This batch of funds has been idle for over 2.5 hours, after which they publicly called on Circle and Tether to freeze the assets.At 5 PM, crypto researcher SomaXBT posted that Circle has frozen the USDC assets and specifically called on Tether to follow up. As of the time of publication, Tether has not responded.

According to a report by The Information, Tether has some funds trapped at one of its offshore banking partners, which is facing liquidation risk after asset seizures in the United States.Tether stated that the assets it holds at the bank EQIBank are limited, accounting for less than 0.034% of its total assets.

According to official news, Tether, corporate and institutional bank Pave Bank, and the Singapore non-profit organization GFTN (Global Financial and Technology Network) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on September 24, 2026, to jointly explore the launch of the "Georgia-Singapore FinTech Scholar Program."The program aims to select outstanding STEM undergraduates from Tbilisi State University to study for one semester at Singapore Management University starting in 2027. The content will cover academic courses, industry exchanges, mentorship, and a graduation project focusing on the Georgia-Southeast Asia FinTech corridor. Participants will also have the opportunity for internships with partner organizations and access to GFTN's global knowledge network resources.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that this collaboration aims to open global opportunities for young talent and help build a more inclusive financial future.

The stablecoin giant Tether's Tether AI Research today released QVAC Genesis III, a synthetic training dataset aimed at the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with a scale of 19.143 billion tokens, covering 159.6 million documents.It is reported that Tether hopes to enhance the reasoning and teaching capabilities of small AI models, allowing more AI assistants to run directly on laptops, mobile phones, and local servers, reducing the ongoing reliance on large cloud models.Genesis III continues the data lineage of Genesis I and Genesis II, covering 19 curriculum-related fields including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, medicine, electrical engineering, and machine learning, aimed at high school, university, and professional applications. Tether states that the dataset will focus on training models to explain problem-solving paths, identify erroneous reasoning, and provide corrections, rather than just outputting final answers.According to Tether's disclosed test results, a 1.7 billion parameter model trained with Genesis III option-level data achieved an effective answer rate of 99.45% in relevant benchmark tests. Compared to the Cosmopedia-v2 training model of similar token scale, Genesis III improved scores on the ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, and MMLU STEM benchmarks by 28.57, 21.35, and 15.03 percentage points, respectively.

According to Bloomberg, the stablecoin issuer Tether has become an important lender of gold. As of the end of June, the financing provided by Tether to the U.S. gold trading platform Gold.com accounted for most of its $1.7 billion in outstanding precious metal leases.Gold.com’s payables and advance payments to Tether totaled $1.45 billion. Tether invested in this platform earlier this year.

Tether posted on platform X that USDT has been launched on the privacy protocol Zama.

According to the official announcement, Tether has announced the joint launch of a $400 million private credit fund, StableFund, in collaboration with Fasanara Capital, aiming to attract third-party institutional capital to $3 billion.The fund will provide short-term, asset-backed credit financing to small and medium-sized enterprises in over 60 countries worldwide. Tether will provide USDT settlement infrastructure and financing opportunities, while Fasanara will act as the investment manager.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated, "USDT is designed to be a frictionless global currency available around the clock," and through this fund, Tether's financing network will be transformed into a direct capital channel flowing to the businesses and communities that need it most.

Tether froze approximately $39.3 million USDT across 10 addresses on the Tron network earlier today, which are related to Xinbi Guarantee. Insiders revealed that Xinbi Guarantee is a guaranteed trading market that emerged around 2022 on Telegram.Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs has described it as one of the largest illegal cryptocurrency markets in Southeast Asia, stating that the platform has processed a cumulative transaction volume of about $24.2 billion. The on-chain tracking platform MistTrack was the first to disclose the news regarding the frozen USDT. This freeze indicates that Tether is further taking on-chain asset freezing measures to restrict addresses deemed to be associated with high risk or suspected illegal activities.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino revealed that Tether's P2P technology team is developing a censorship-resistant and fault-tolerant decentralized peer-to-peer search engine called Unstoppable Search Engine. The architecture supports horizontal scaling across thousands of distributed nodes and employs a fault-tolerant structure for data self-organization to maintain high availability and censorship resistance.Ardoino stated that the research and development is progressing smoothly, and the complete archived data of Wikipedia has been distributed and stored across 100 distributed nodes in the testing environment, achieving millisecond-level retrieval with excellent performance.

According to MistTrack monitoring, Tether froze approximately 39.27 million USDT across 10 addresses on the Tron network a few hours ago, which are related to Xinbi Guarantee.Previously, Tether had frozen funds related to Huiwang Guarantee, and this action seems to be another blow against illegal hosting platforms on Telegram.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Tether Treasury transferred 500 million USDT to Binance on the TRON blockchain.

According to Crypto Briefing, Colombian fintech company Plenti has completed a $3 million seed round financing, led by Tether with participation from Verda Ventures. The new funds will be used to support existing operations in Colombia and expand into Peru and Bolivia.Founded in 2022, Plenti provides multi-currency account services for freelancers and remote workers, allowing users to hold US dollars, euros, and Colombian pesos, earn balance yields, and invest in US stocks, ETFs, digital gold, and crypto assets. The company has served over 150,000 active users, with an annual transaction volume exceeding $3.1 billion, and has processed over 680 million USDT since 2023.

Tether is expanding its business beyond stablecoins by launching an open-source AI translation model that can run offline on smartphones and laptops.These models support 19 African languages, and Tether positions this technology for use in education, healthcare, and other areas with limited internet access.

According to BeInCrypto, two Thai merchants have sued Tether, claiming that their $42.4 million USDT wallet was blacklisted at the informal request of U.S. government agents without a search warrant or court order.The plaintiffs are seeking to lift the freeze and are claiming damages from Tether for the profits generated from investing the corresponding reserves during the freeze period.