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Ahmed Barakat
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Attorney Charles Gerstein filed a claim in Manhattan federal court Thursday seeking to force Tether to transfer 344,149,759 USDT, roughly $344 million, frozen at two Tron wallet addresses designated by OFAC as belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The plaintiffs, are asking the Southern District of New York to compel Tether to zero out the blocked wallets and reissue an equivalent amount of USDT to a wallet controlled by their counsel.
The filing is a direct expansion of Gerstein’s earlier litigation targeting frozen funds in the North Korea-linked Arbitrum case and separate claims against Railgun DAO.
Bearish signal for stablecoin issuer confidence. If courts accept this liability theory, Tether’s administrative freeze controls, designed for sanctions compliance, become a litigation target in every jurisdiction where judgment creditors hold unpaid terrorism awards.
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How the Liability Theory Works Mechanically, and Why Tether Freeze Function Is the Fulcrum
The mechanism here is worth understanding precisely. Unlike bitcoin or ether, USDT includes issuer-level administrative controls: Tether can freeze wallets, blacklist addresses, zero out balances, and reissue tokens to a new destination address.
Gerstein’s filing argues that because Tether already immobilized the funds in response to OFAC’s sanctions designation of the two Tron addresses, the company has demonstrated both the technical capability and the practical willingness to act unilaterally on those holdings.
The chain of events runs as follows. OFAC designated the two Tron wallet addresses as IRGC property. Tether froze the 344,149,759 USDT held there.
The plaintiffs, holders of billions of dollars in unpaid U.S. court judgments tied to Iranian-backed terrorism, now argue that the frozen USDT constitutes blocked property of a state sponsor of terrorism, making it subject to execution under federal law.
The ask is not a seizure of Tether’s own reserves. It is a court order compelling Tether to use controls it has already used, directed at a different destination address.
That distinction matters analytically. Tether has already frozen $4.2 billion in USDT across more than 5,000 wallets linked to criminal activity and assisted the DOJ in seizing over $6 million connected to a Southeast Asian fraud scheme.
The plaintiffs are arguing Tether is not being asked to do something unprecedented, only to redirect an existing freeze toward judgment creditors rather than leaving the funds in limbo.
The legal precedent being constructed here is that administrative control over an asset is functionally equivalent to possession, and that possession creates liability to judgment creditors under the right statutory framework.
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