Crypto
Bank stablecoins can earn DeFi yield, but holders bear the risk: Katana CEO
Katana CEO Matt Fisher has said a dollar stablecoin planned by 21 financial institutions for the first half of 2027 could generate yield through independent DeFi protocols, although holders would assume risks not covered by its issuing banks.
Summary
- Twenty-one financial institutions plan to introduce a U.S. dollar stablecoin in the first half of 2027.
- The GENIUS Act prohibits permitted payment stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders.
- Fisher said independent protocols could earn returns by lending stablecoins to identifiable borrowers.
- Smart-contract, liquidity, oracle, and custody failures would generally leave depositors carrying any losses.
Katana CEO Matt Fisher told crypto.news that the GENIUS Act restriction applies to permitted stablecoin issuers, not necessarily to how holders use tokens after receiving them, though he described his position as a market-structure view rather than legal advice.
“The GENIUS Act stops the issuer from paying yield; it doesn’t stop the holder from putting the dollar to work somewhere the issuer doesn’t control. Once a compliant stablecoin leaves the issuer and moves into an independent protocol, yield can come from genuine economic activity.”
Bank stablecoins may leave tokenized cash idle
Fisher’s comments follow a Sep. 1 commitment by Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, UBS and 17 other financial institutions to establish a new stablecoin company during the second half of 2026, subject to closing conditions.
As detailed in a recent 21-firm stablecoin plan, the unnamed venture expects to introduce a dollar-denominated token in the first half of 2027. It may later add tokens tied to other G7 currencies, with a euro product listed as its first expansion priority.
The participating institutions said the dollar token could support wholesale, institutional and retail transactions, including cross-border payments and digital asset settlement. North American participants include Fidelity Investments, Capital One, Wells Fargo, PNC Financial Services, Scotiabank, TD Bank Group, and WisdomTree, alongside Bank of America, Citi, and Goldman Sachs.
Banco Santander, BBVA, Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank, and UBS represent Europe. MUFG Bank, Sirius International Holding, and Standard Bank complete the group.
According to the official consortium announcement, the project intends to comply with the GENIUS Act and the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation where applicable. The group has not disclosed the token’s name, supported blockchains, reserve custodian, governance structure, or redemption terms.
Under current U.S. stablecoin issuance rules, permitted issuers cannot pay interest or yield to holders. The federal framework also requires eligible payment stablecoins to carry one-to-one backing with approved liquid reserves, regular disclosures, and defined redemption rights.
For Fisher, the restriction leaves a gap between creating a tokenized dollar and making it productive. A compliant issuer may improve how money moves without providing a return on cash held in the token.
Jiko’s 2026 Corporate Cash Confidence Survey illustrates the size of the existing cash problem. Conducted between April 13 and June 19 among 192 treasury professionals, the survey found that nearly half kept more than 10% of corporate cash uninvested at any given time. Another 23% said more than one-quarter of their cash regularly remained idle.
Liquidity still came before returns for the survey participants. Access to cash when required ranked as the leading priority for 60% of respondents, while 46% selected risk control and protection of principal. Yield ranked behind both considerations.
Independent DeFi protocols could supply the yield
Once a stablecoin enters a protocol outside the issuer’s control, Fisher said its return could come from overcollateralized loans, market makers financing inventory or other users paying to borrow the asset.
He compared the arrangement with the separation between a bank deposit and a money-market fund. Under his interpretation, the bank creates the dollar token while an independent venue puts it to work.
“The yield comes from what the cash is lent against, not from the bank that minted it,” Fisher said.
The source of the return determines whether the arrangement can last, according to Fisher. Interest paid by a borrower using the stablecoin represents economic demand, while rewards created through repeated issuance of a protocol’s governance token depend on a subsidy.
Infrastructure such as Katana’s VaultBridge protocol is designed to route stablecoins toward lending demand, Fisher said. His comments about the product represent Katana’s description of its own infrastructure rather than an independent assessment of its performance or risks.
The distinction also sits inside an active U.S. policy dispute. In January, American community bankers challenged indirect yield paid through exchanges and other third parties. The banks argued that such rewards could pull deposits away from local lenders even when stablecoin issuers did not pay the returns themselves.
Fisher’s model differs from a passive holding reward because it requires the token holder to place funds into a separate strategy. Returns would depend on lending or another income-producing activity rather than solely on ownership of the stablecoin.
Sustainable stablecoin yield needs identifiable demand
Treasurers evaluating an on-chain return should first identify who is paying to use the stablecoin, Fisher said. A named source of demand allows depositors to examine why a borrower needs the funds and which risks support the offered rate.
His second test concerns how the rate behaves. Lending returns should move with the supply of available dollars and borrower demand, while a fixed headline annual percentage yield may depend on a temporary incentive program.
Removing token rewards provides the third test. If the base return disappears when a protocol stops issuing incentives, Fisher said the advertised yield was a subsidy rather than income generated by the underlying activity.
“Any yield materially above the risk-free rate is a risk premium you’re being paid to bear. A treasurer should be able to name the specific risk they’re taking to earn it.”
Without an identifiable risk, Fisher said the return may come from a subsidy that will end or from an exposure the depositor has not priced. His tests do not establish whether a product is legally compliant, and the regulatory treatment would depend on its structure and the relationship between the issuer, protocol and holder.
DeFi yield leaves holders carrying the risk
Moving a bank-issued stablecoin into DeFi introduces exposures absent from simply holding the payment token, Fisher said. Smart contracts may contain exploitable code, while a failed or manipulated oracle can supply an incorrect collateral price.
Liquidity creates a separate problem during stress. Even when a protocol reports enough assets for normal redemptions, depositors may be unable to exit at par if many users withdraw at the same time.
Self-custody can also leave the holder without a chargeback or customer service route after an incorrect transaction or loss of account access. Counterparty failures and failed lending strategies add further paths to losses.
“In most DeFi, no issuer stands behind the strategy. If an independent protocol’s strategy fails, the loss generally sits with the depositor, not a bank, not a backstop.”
Audited code, liquid markets, and conservative collateral can reduce parts of the exposure, according to Fisher, but none turns an independent protocol into a bank guarantee. Eligible payment stablecoins are also not FDIC-insured deposits under the U.S. framework, although the law provides reserve, disclosure, redemption, and insolvency protections.
DeFi developers have raised a related concern about rules that could make issuers responsible for activity they cannot control. In June, Hyperliquid Policy Center and Paradigm warned that proposed secondary-market compliance duties could push regulated stablecoin liquidity toward permissioned or offshore platforms.
Corporate adoption depends on liquidity during stress
Fisher also rejected the idea that DeFi had already solved the problem of unproductive digital dollars. DefiLlama recorded approximately $305.3 billion in stablecoins and about $87.6 billion in DeFi total value locked at the time of reporting, leaving much of the stablecoin supply outside deposited DeFi capital.
Before treating a protocol as treasury infrastructure, companies would need transparent economic activity, predictable liquidity, conservative collateral, real-time reporting, and defined responses to failures, Fisher said. Operational requirements would include round-the-clock settlement and counterparties able to keep functioning under stress.
The advertised rate should not serve as the primary test, according to Fisher. He said treasurers need to examine the redemption route and determine how long an exit could take on a day when many other depositors are trying to withdraw simultaneously.
“Most treasurers underwrite the yield and inherit the redemption path by accident,” he said. Fisher added that corporate users should test stressed exit conditions rather than relying on the liquidity a protocol displays during normal trading.
BTC’s move above $80,000 has triggered a “double-bottom breakout,” a technical analysis pattern confirming a bullish trend and opening the door for a rally to $100,000, according to Jurrien Timmer, director of global macro at Fidelity Investments.
“Bitcoin is looking particularly interesting here as it challenges key resistance at $80k. If it breaks it will confirm a double bottom targeting $100K,” Timmer wrote on X on Friday.
A double bottom looks like the letter W on a price chart. The price drops to a low, bounces, falls back to roughly the same level, then rises again. The two dips show buyers stepping in at the same price twice. The peak in the middle of the W acts as resistance. A break above it suggests sellers have run out of steam and a new uptrend may be starting.
Timmer’s chart shows bitcoin’s two lows this year at $60,033 and $57,742, with the middle peak near $82,800.
Chart patterns are not guarantees. Breakouts often fail, reversing quickly and trapping buyers who chased the move.
Still, the bullish setup is consistent with options traders positioning for more gains. The $90,000 call is the most popular bitcoin options bet on crypto exchange Deribit, with $2.45 billion in open interest. The $95,000 call follows with $2.33 billion, and the $100,000 call holds $1.79 billion. A call gives the buyer the right to buy at a set price and profits when the market rises above it.
XRP price hovers under $1.49 after three consecutive daily declines left the token losing the $1.50 support, even as a modest bounce pulled it off session lows. CoinGlass data showed the long-to-short ratio at 0.975, meaning short positions marginally outnumbered longs, while the funding rate sat at a positive 0.008%, the reading that determines whether long or short traders pay a periodic fee to hold perpetual futures.
XRP Long Short Ratio, Coinglass
That combination is the crux of the problem. Traders are still paying to stay long, yet the spot price has not moved in a way that rewards the bet, and the disconnect between heavy spot selling and futures demand is the setup that tends to unwind fast once a key level gives way.
A 0.975 long-to-short ratio is not a bearish signal in any decisive sense. It sits close enough to 1.0 that it reads as near-balanced positioning rather than a market leaning hard in either direction.
XRP Funding Rate, Coinglass
Funding tells a more interesting story on its own. A positive rate means demand for long exposure in crypto derivatives is real enough that longs are compensating shorts to hold the position, which typically signals conviction that price moves higher.
However, it cuts both ways: if price falls further, those same leveraged longs become forced sellers, and a positive funding regime built on thin spot demand can flip into a liquidation cascade faster than one built on genuine accumulation.
CryptoQuant’s summary data flagged overheating conditions across both XRP’s spot and futures markets, alongside sell-side dominance in futures, meaning sellers have retained the upper hand in derivatives even as funding stays positive. That is the missing piece: positive funding shows traders are willing to hold bullish exposure, but it has not yet translated into enough buying pressure to absorb the futures selling and push through resistance.
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XRP Price and the $1.37 Support
The daily chart still leans bullish on a longer timeframe. XRP held above its 50-day price exponential moving average near $1.365 and its 200-day EMA near $1.369 through the three-day slide, with the 100-day EMA sitting lower at $1.307 as a secondary reference.
Momentum has cooled rather than reversed. The RSI sat near 55, close to neutral, and the MACD flattened around zero, a pattern consistent with consolidation after an earlier advance rather than an active breakdown.
The level that matters most sits at $1.37, where the 50-day and 200-day EMAs converge into a single support band. A clean break below that zone opens the $1.30 area, and a deeper slide would eventually put the $1.00 psychological level in play, though XRP would need to fall substantially before that becomes the immediate focus. On the upside, reclaiming the $1.574 resistance level is the trigger that would strengthen the case for a move toward $1.90.
Trade XRP on Bybit and Get a Chance to Win Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop
What Happens Next for XRP?
Two scenarios frame the near-term path. If XRP holds the $1.37 zone, the market stays in a consolidation phase where positive funding continues to reflect trader appetite for long exposure, but that alone won’t confirm a breakout without a corresponding rise in open interest and spot volume.
If XRP price instead reclaims $1.574, the technical case for a run toward $1.90 gets meaningfully stronger, and that move would likely force shorts to cover into strength. The alternative is a sustained break below $1.37, which shifts focus to $1.30 as the next line of defense, with $1.00 as the deeper level only if that support also fails.
Either way, the current setup leaves no room for complacency on either side of the trade. Near-balanced positioning combined with positive funding and futures sell-side dominance is a fragile mix, and the next move in spot price will do more to settle the argument than another shift in the long-short ratio.
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The post XRP Price in Danger: Positive Funding Masks a Fragile Setup appeared first on Cryptonews.
Bitcoin recovered Monday’s losses to trade at $84,170 on Tuesday, up 0.82% since midnight UTC and 1.4% over 24 hours, with 72 of the 100 CoinDesk 100 constituents higher and the index adding 0.89% to 1,904.49.
The bid is arriving despite conditions that have been suppressing risk assets for a week, the 10-year Treasury yield sitting at 5.234% after ending Monday above 5.2%, near levels last seen in 2007, and the 30-year at 5.549% having topped 5.56% on Monday, around a 2004 high.
U.S. stocks fell for a second session on Monday, the Dow dropping more than 300 points and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite shedding 0.8% and 0.9%, with futures mixed on Tuesday morning.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is driving the move for the second time in a week, with the DeFi Select Index (DFX) gaining 5.0% since midnight, led by lending protocol token aave at 11% and curve dao token at 5.2%. The CoinDesk 80 rose 2.0% against the CoinDesk 5’s 1.3%, though the ranking inverts over 24 hours, where the CD5’s 1.7% beats the CD80’s 0.44%.
The D’CENT wallet hack, the year’s second-largest drain of XRP behind the Bitget crypto exchange hack, has spilled beyond the XRP Ledger onto additional blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar.
Hackers have drained more than 12.4 million XRP from more than 7,000 D’CENT wallets, still some way behind Bitget’s loss of 102.9 million XRP.
Although the wallet was popular among the XRP community, D’CENT users who owned assets of other blockchains have also lost their funds.
D’CENT’s own disclosure named Bitcoin, Tron, and Ethereum, for example. Even a Stellar user has lost XLM in the incident.
Hackers are able to sweep funds across blockchains with one compromised recovery phrase for the multi-blockchain wallet.
IoTrust, the maker of D’CENT, confirmed at least 110 abnormal transfer reports, including non-XRP assets, per ZDNet Korea.
XRP holders lose $18 million in D’CENT hack
Drains of XRP are the most well-documented, due to the prominence of D’CENT among XRP holders.
At least six waves of theft occurred between September 15 and 20, emptying 6,678 wallets of 11.7 million XRP.
The thief stole from large wallets first, by hand, and soon wrote scripts to take funds from progressively smaller wallets.
Warnings from D’CENT and other members of the XRP community couldn’t stop the drainage. Thieves took 640,370 additional XRP after September 21, bringing the tally to above 12.4 million.
By Friday, 6.3 million of those stolen XRP had crossed to Ethereum’s blockchain through the swap service THORChain.
As the theft spilled over to other blockchains, researchers admitted the scope of the losses, saying, “Most of it is no longer XRP.”
Read more: David Schwartz warns of hard fork because XRP nodes won’t upgrade
In August, D’CENT was still touting its hardware wallets’ secure element, boasting that it was impervious to vulnerabilities linked to the Coldcard hack.
D’CENT now warns users that wallets they created using its app are vulnerable, urging them to create a fresh recovery phrase and immediately migrate everything, including tokens, NFTs, and any staked assets.
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Market action since 2022 backs Thielen’s take. The 10-year yield more than doubled to 3.88% that year as the Fed raised interest rates rapidly, including several 50- and 75-basis-point hikes to fight inflation.
Bitcoin fell 64% that year. Fed tightening and rising yields added to the pain from crypto scams and blowups.
The picture has been different since. From the end of 2023, the 10-year yield has risen 135 basis points to 5.23%, the highest since 2007. Over the same stretch, bitcoin has roughly doubled to $86,000, even after pulling back from its October record above $126,000.
Thielen and others attribute much of the recent rise in yields to fiscal fears and a higher term premium. In plain English, investors want to be paid more to lock up their money in long-term bonds, given the uncertainty over inflation and government borrowing.
Chicago-based Strategic Analytics made a similar point about gold, noting that it has tracked fiscal risk more closely than the Fed’s policy path since 2022.
“Since 2022, gold has increasingly tracked fiscal-risk perceptions – term premium, deficits, debt sustainability – rather than the Fed’s policy path. Gold is not defying real yields. It is pricing fiscal sustainability and currency debasement, which has become the marginal driver,” it said recently in a LinkedIn post.
Humanoid robots box during the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo on September 25, 2026 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — China’s securities regulator is raising the bar for public listings of humanoid robot startups, according to three sources familiar with the CSRC’s thinking.
It’s a sign of how one of the hottest sectors of the market is cooling, as investors globally assess whether artificial intelligence stocks are in a bubble.
The Chinese regulator wants local “embodied AI” startups seeking to go public to meet three specific criteria, according to the sources, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.
They are:
- The “window guidance” requires that the humanoid applicants have sustainable revenue and commercial orders.
- Losses must narrow, with one source saying a three-year forecast is needed.
- The company must possess core technology such as robotic brain or hands.
Even if a startup only has to meet two of the three criteria, as one source indicated, it’s unclear which, if any, of the companies can do so.
That’s lowered expectations to just a handful, or none, of these startups making it to public markets, the sources said.
At least two dozen humanoid-related embodied AI companies have filed to list in Hong Kong alone, according to two of the sources. Hong Kong in May 2025 started letting tech companies file confidentially for IPOs.
The Hong Kong stock exchange declined to comment. The China Securities Regulatory Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mainland China companies wanting to list in Hong Kong also need the CSRC’s blessing.
Unitree IPO impact
Scrutiny on China’s growing number of humanoid robot startups and their fast-growing valuations — supported by a mix of government and private sector funds — has grown over the last several weeks.
The industry’s posterchild, Unitree, got a regulatory fast-track to its listing in Shanghai on Aug. 19 as the World Robot Conference kicked off in Beijing.
But in a keynote a day later, founder Wang Xingxing cautioned that commercialization beyond dancing robots remained years away. It accentuated a debate that picked up in subsequent weeks on what humanoids can actually do — and whether industry startups were actually making money.
China now has well over 100 humanoid companies, which fall under the national push for “embodied AI.” The term received Beijing’s support in the last two annual government work reports, although authorities have warned of a bubble in the humanoid robot industry.
Reflecting a rapid surge in interest, investment in the sector hit 47.09 billion yuan ($6.95 billion) in the second quarter, more than double that of the first quarter — and up over six times versus the same period last year, according to industry data provider Xiniu.
Unitree raised about about 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in its IPO on Aug. 19 with Shanghai-listed shares skyrocketing more than 460% in their debut to close at 845 yuan.
The stock had nearly halved in price as of Monday, at 459.65 yuan a share.
Hong Kong-listed Ubtech has also tumbled more than 40% so far this year. The company, which went public in December 2023, still reported an operating loss for the first half of this year of 279 million yuan.
The share price decline contrasts with the flood of capital pouring into humanoid robotics companies over the last 12 months or so. The tech, often called “physical AI” in China, has been seen as a way for early-stage investors to benefit from the surge of interest in artificial intelligence models.
However, Rhodium Group analysis this month found that China’s AI companies only make about 10% the revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI. The ratio of valuation to revenue — especially for Chinese AI startups Moonshot and DeepSeek — was far higher than their U.S. rivals, the report said.
While expectations grow for the U.S. AI giants’ IPOs, chipmaker AMD said Monday it is acquiring World Labs for $8.2 billion in a stock deal. The startup, founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, is building AI models for creating virtual 3D environments frequently used in humanoid robot development.
The launch this morning was both imperfect and stripped down to its orbital essentials. On the way up, one of the Starship’s six engines failed to burn properly, requiring the other engines to compensate for the missing thrust to get the ship in orbit.
In addition, the return to Earth was simplified. SpaceX has made itself famous for safely landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 and Starship boosters—with 641 out of 688 Falcon 9 launches featuring this kind of recovery, allowing the boosters to be reused and make flying cheaper. Starship’s first stage, meantime, performs what has become known as a chopstick recovery, with the booster navigating its way back to the launch tower where two giant metal arms pluck it from the sky. For the current mission, the chopstick recovery was done away with to simplify the flight objectives; instead the first stage made a soft, engine-assisted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship spacecraft was planned for a six-orbit, 10-hour mission, with the ship’s engines set to fire around the dinner hour Monday to bring the spacecraft down for a similar gentle, watery landing.
Goldman Sachs’ Anshul Sehgal says bonds yielding 5% or more are not the best trade right now. He still favors AI infrastructure, which he sees as a far more asymmetric bet than the long bond.
Sehgal, a global co-head of Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities (FICC) at the bank, laid out the view just a few days after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
Why Goldman Sachs Is Passing on 5%+ Bonds
On Goldman’s The Markets, Sehgal said the 30-year Treasury, known as the long bond, had hovered around 5% for weeks. He noted that clients want to buy it at 5% or higher, yet he still sees little upside.
The yield has kept climbing since the recording, reaching 5.56% on September 29, a new 52-week high. Sehgal blamed structural pressure for the strain on the long end. Retiring baby boomers are buying fewer long bonds, and heavy long-dated borrowing tied to AI is crowding the market.
Those pressures explain why the selloff can persist even without a fresh inflation shock. Fewer retirees buying long bonds and a steady flow of long-dated borrowing tied to AI both weigh on prices, and neither fades quickly.
Sehgal adds that fear over US debt sustainability makes investors less willing to hold the long end, which feeds on itself.
The takeaway is that a rising yield does not necessarily break his thesis. It may instead show why he sees limited reward in owning the bond, while the risk to his AI trade is that costlier long-term borrowing squeezes the levered companies he favors.
AI Compute Is the Asymmetric Trade
An asymmetric trade offers far more potential gain than risk. Sehgal applies that label to compute (AI computing power), data centers, and Neoclouds, which are cloud providers built to rent out that capacity.
“I think the asymmetric expression is being long compute.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
The catch is leverage. Savers collecting higher interest have effectively financed the AI build-out, leaving equities more indebted than a year ago. Sehgal admits these are levered bets. Still, he thinks they can multiply in value, while the wider stock market looks less certain.
Tighter Policy Hits Spenders, Not Capital
Sehgal says the Fed frames its September 16 hike as catch-up after five years above its inflation target. Schwab counts 16 of 19 Fed officials expecting another increase this year. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh also stressed three times that the Fed is easing back some stimulus rather than turning restrictive, Sehgal adds.
He argues that government interest payments flow to capital rather than workers, so higher rates curb household spending, a risk for the broader stock market.
He also rejects the debt-sustainability fears weighing on long bonds.
“For me, that’s a red herring.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
Meanwhile, BlackRock’s Rick Rieder is cutting equities for bonds paying 7% to 8%, though his high-grade bond call still cautions against rushing into the 10-year Treasury.
Sehgal names the Middle East conflict as the top driver of policy and markets in the weeks ahead.
The post Goldman Sachs Explains Why Not to Buy the 5%+ Bonds and Rather Stick to AI appeared first on BeInCrypto.
“Bitcoin has pulled back to $83K, testing the lower boundary of last week’s consolidation range,” Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email to CoinDesk. “As with the market as a whole, a retest of the $82K region, where peaks were formed in May and early September, is entirely to be expected under current conditions.”
“Looking ahead, a sustained return to prices below $80K would be an important signal that the market is not ready to move higher for some time yet. If, however, this consolidation is soon followed by a new bullish momentum, it could send the leading cryptocurrency well above $90K,” he added.
The pressure is coming from bonds and oil.
Treasuries steadied in Asia after tumbling during U.S. trading, with the 10-year yield up one basis point to 5.25% after reaching its highest level since 2007 on Monday. A higher guaranteed return on government debt raises the bar for holding assets that pay no income, bitcoin among them.
Brent rose more than 1% to nearly $107 a barrel, its second straight gain, as hopes for an imminent diplomatic breakthrough with Iran faded.
Pricier oil feeds into inflation, and traders have been adding to bets that the Fed will raise rates again. MSCI’s All Country World Index fell to its lowest since Sept. 18, and Nasdaq 100 futures slipped 0.3% after Monday’s tech-led selloff on Wall Street.
U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether is a go-to tool for the Iranian government to bypass sanctions, a new report from a group of Senate Democrats said.
Democrats on the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence published a report Monday laying out the argument that Tether plays a key role in allowing Iran to conduct transactions that skirt international sanctions.
“Iran’s cryptocurrency-based shadow banking network has processed significant volumes of funds and implicates various Iranian interests,” the report said, adding that Tether has “repeatedly failed” to block Iran-connected wallets.
“USDT has become a significant financial lifeline within Iran’s shadow banking network,” the report said.
When Tether does freeze wallets, it sometimes takes weeks, but the company also sometimes responds to requests without actually blacklisting wallets, the report claimed.
“Prior to 2024, Tether did not comprehensively and consistently freeze wallets designated by counter-terrorism agencies and continues to fail to proactively block clearly illicit wallets,” the report said. “This absence of deterrence invited abuse: terrorist organizations such as Hamas shifted from transacting in Bitcoin and a mix of cryptocurrencies to promoting USDT.”
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