Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, has frozen more than USD 1.5 billion in tokens connected to the attack on Binance on 29 October 2026. The company said the freeze took place within 30 minutes of the incident. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified North Korea as responsible for the attack.
Because the freeze was applied at that stage, the attackers could not transfer, swap, or launder the funds. Tether’s process to freeze tokens at the address level means that how quickly it acts, in coordination with law enforcement, determines whether stolen assets remain within reach. US authorities have repeatedly warned that cryptocurrency theft is a key source of funding for North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said the response showed that USDT is an unsuitable vehicle for illicit funds. Bo Hines, CEO of Tether USA₮, described the action as a contribution to US and global security.
According to the announcement, in April 2026, Tether froze more than USD 344 million in USDT across two addresses, acting on information from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and US law enforcement. OFAC designated those addresses as Central Bank of Iran identifiers the following day. In July 2026, as the Treasury expanded its designations, Tether froze a further USD 130 million across four wallets. This brought its Iran-linked freezes for the year to nearly USD 550 million. Separately, as part of action against sanctioned Russian activity, the company froze around USD 23 million linked to the Garantex exchange in cooperation with the US Secret Service.
Sanctions alignment and law enforcement cooperation
Tether applies a wallet-freezing policy aligned with OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List. The company cited the list of addresses referenced in the Blumenthal report as an example. According to Tether, it froze 99% of those addresses before blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis tagged them as belonging to Iran. Tether has described the coverage surrounding that report as a misinformation campaign against the company.
Tether reports working with more than 360 law enforcement agencies across 73 countries on investigations into illicit activity, including terrorist financing. The FBI and the US Secret Service have been onboarded to its platform. As of 31 October 2026, Tether had helped freeze more than 3.590 wallets holding approximately 1.6 billion USDT for the US Department of Justice, the Secret Service, and the FBI.
In total, Tether says it has frozen more than 7 billion USDT held in secondary market addresses, including the Binance-related funds. Most of this is connected to fraud and theft, particularly decentralised finance (DeFi) and exchange hacks. Approximately 1.2 billion USDT obtained through fraud and theft has been returned to the rightful owners and to law enforcement through reissuance.
