Bessent Targets $1 Billion in Iran-Linked Tether (USDT) Within a Week

Update 12:11 UTC: Details filed in the September case show how the government converts a freeze into ownership: prosecutors in the Southern District of New York first obtained a seizure warrant controlling roughly $61 million in USDT, then filed the civil forfeiture action seeking formal transfer of the coins to the…

Bessent's One-Week Seizure Clock

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that the United States can seize roughly $1 billion in Iranian-linked cryptocurrency within a week, telling a policy audience in Washington that federal authorities already know where the assets sit. Speaking at the Newsmax Policy Summit, he cast the move as part of an “absolute isolation” campaign against Tehran and said the funds were being cornered. He gave no wallet addresses, no legal pathway and no confirmation that any action has started, though frozen funds sitting under Iranian-controlled addresses cannot be transferred or redeemed in the meantime. The Tether (USDT) price holds its dollar peg regardless; the exposure here sits at the wallet level, not the market. The threat has a record behind it. On August 13 Bessent promised measures “never seen in the history” of economic isolation, and the Treasury campaign known as Operation Economic Outcast followed on August 24, naming digital assets among five Iranian economic sectors open to sanctions and designating nearly 60 entities, individuals and vessels. The department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network separately proposed a rule that would revoke Banque Misr UAE's correspondent banking access in the United States, and on Thursday Treasury said the operation had moved against remnants of Iran's shadow tanker fleet. The freeze data put scale on the effort: Tether says it helped US authorities lock roughly $550 million in USDT this year, including more than $344 million from two addresses in April and over $130 million from four TRON wallets in July. Analytics firm Elliptic has tied $507 million in USDT directly to the Central Bank of Iran, which it said was using the stablecoin to prop up a collapsing rial. A Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations review led by Richard Blumenthal found that 84% of 846 Iran-linked wallets transacted almost entirely in USDT, and federal prosecutors filed a civil forfeiture case in September seeking about $61 million in crypto tied to Iranian oil sales.

The enforcement arc behind the seizure threat runs through a series of designations that began earlier in the year. OFAC sanctioned two TRON-based wallets tied to the IRGC and Hezbollah on April 24, freezing about $344 million in USDT with Tether's cooperation, then added four exchanges including Iran's largest, Nobitex, on June 2; Treasury said Nobitex handled more than half of the crypto entering Iran in 2025 and took part in stablecoin transactions by the Central Bank of Iran. On Aug. 7, OFAC added Shelbit and Aban Tether, citing over $1 million sent from IRGC-linked wallets to Shelbit's exchange address and more than $2 million moved back. The campaign reached Zanjani directly on Sept. 17, when Treasury sanctioned his BitBank exchange over transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin to the IRGC in June and July.

Zanjani's Network Inside Binance

The Wall Street Journal's reporting the same day filled in the enforcement backdrop. According to the report, sanctioned Iranian financier Babak Zanjani moved about $850 million through 21 accounts at Binance, using an overseas corporate web that connected Turkey's ZedPay payments firm, the Zedcex trading platform and diamond sellers in the United Arab Emirates, a payment architecture built to bypass international financial sanctions. Binance internal investigation records show at least $67 million of that flow reached crypto wallets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One participant, Tajik national Sukhrob Oimakhmadov, held VIP status on the exchange with fee discounts and dedicated service that went well beyond routine know-your-customer screening, and his account took in more than $10 million from IRGC-linked wallets starting in late 2023, with funds later forwarded to other IRGC-associated addresses. The exchange has not publicly addressed the records, and no US agency has confirmed the account-level figures. It is likewise not confirmed that the $1 billion Bessent targets ties directly to Zanjani's network, and the secretary did not specify which coins sit in the target hoard, where they are stored or under what legal instrument they would be taken. Bessent framed the seizure as the financial leg of a campaign that has moved past maximum pressure: oil exports are to be halted entirely, he said, leaving Iran for the first time since it began producing oil with nothing to sell at sea. On land, he said the UAE and Oman are cooperating with Washington, while discussions with Pakistan and Turkey aim to close transit routes into and out of Iran. Aviation restrictions, he argued, have already made it hard for Iranian leadership and IRGC figures to travel abroad or reach assets held in Europe, a pressure point he described with pointed references to London, Paris and Geneva.

Two numbers frame what comes next. The roughly $550 million Tether has already frozen sits well below the $1 billion now in Bessent's crosshairs, so either new addresses have been mapped or existing freezes are set to expand through formal seizure. The Binance records, meanwhile, show sanctions enforcement running through exchange data: account-level histories traced $67 million to IRGC-linked wallets without any on-chain de-anonymization breakthrough, and Oimakhmadov's VIP tier shows how a crypto whale arrangement becomes an enforcement liability once internal records surface. The open question is the legal instrument. Treasury could publish wallet addresses in a fresh designation, or route the $1 billion through forfeiture actions like September's $61 million case. Bessent has delivered on self-set deadlines before, which is what gives this one-week clock its weight.

Bessent's estimate came with fresh designations behind it. On Oct. 8, the same day as his remarks, Treasury sanctioned 17 vessels it accused of moving millions of barrels of Iranian crude, petroleum and petrochemical products to South and East Asian markets, using registrations across more than a dozen jurisdictions and front companies, under Executive Order 13902. The department warned foreign firms that facilitating Iranian money laundering could mean exclusion from the US financial system. On-chain sizing is larger than the seizure target: Chainalysis put Iran's 2025 crypto ecosystem above $7.78 billion, with IRGC-linked addresses receiving over $3 billion, and TRM Labs traced about $67 million from the Central Bank of Iran into CoinEx addresses between June 2025 and June 2026, flows the exchange denies having any Iranian state connection to.

On-chain movement added a material data point the same week. Government-linked wallets transferred 17,733 BTC plus 750 WBTC into accounts at Coinbase Prime, the exchange's institutional service, with no confirmed sale so far. The context for that deposit sits in a March 2025 executive order under which seized bitcoin is folded into a strategic bitcoin reserve rather than sold, and estimates of total federal holdings range from roughly 200,000 BTC to as many as 328,000 BTC, with no audited official figure published. Bessent's track record on seizure claims also carries a caveat: in May he said Iran-linked crypto worth about $1 billion had been taken, while Treasury's announcement shortly afterward put the figure closer to $500 million, and he has again declined to say whether the current $1 billion overlaps with anything previously disclosed.

Details filed in the September case show how the government converts a freeze into ownership: prosecutors in the Southern District of New York first obtained a seizure warrant controlling roughly $61 million in USDT, then filed the civil forfeiture action seeking formal transfer of the coins to the state, alleging the network behind them laundered more than $1.5 billion in oil revenue for Iran's military and the IRGC. Chainalysis added a quarterly reading, estimating that IRGC-linked addresses accounted for about half of the crypto value received across Iran's ecosystem in the fourth quarter of 2025, a share derived from identified addresses and likely understated. Assets on cooperating exchanges or centralized stablecoin addresses can be blocked directly, while coins held in self-custody require private keys or a move onto an enforceable platform.