
Key Insights:
Tether, the largest issuer of stablecoins has written a letter to the Department of Justice sharing that it has onboarded FBI and the US Secret Service on its platform to prevent criminals from using its stablecoin USDT.
The company has been working with several law enforcement agencies and has acted on their request.
On Dec 17, 2023, it has frozen $435 million USDT along with 326 wallets on instruction by US authorities.
It has also been actively working with other law enforcement agencies internationally to prevent money laundering, prevent USDT use in trafficking and terror financing.
In a letter addressed to Senator Cynthia Lummis and Congressman J. French Hill Tether responded to to their concerns on money laundering and terror financing via cryptocurrencies.
Tether had also written an earlier letter on November 16, 2023 where it responded to the lawmakers when they raised concerns in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The USDT issuer also revealed in the letter that its was actively also collaborating with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and has taken actions on its Specially Designated Nationals(SDN) list.
#NOTE: The OFAC is an US govt authority that enforces sanctions on countries designated by the US government.
The key points which were mentioned in the letter were:
Lately, there has been a big win for regulatory and law enforcement authorities especially in the USA where the Department of Justice has recently settled the case with Binance where the exchange was made to pay $4 billion in fines and its CEO Changpeng Zhao had to step down.
On the other hand the SEC has unable to prevent Ripple from winning against it, neither it could win in the Grayscale Bitcoin ETF case. Further, it has also signaled that a Bitcoin ETF might be expected soon as close as first half of January 2024.
Tether is the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, which is a very important asset for traders, investors, for making payments and also for Decentralized Finance.
As of 17 Dec 2023, Tether has a market size of nearly $90 Billion.
The company has become the largest issuer of stablecoins beating USDC's Circle (market cap of $24 billion) by a huge margin. The rise of Tether was led by an incident where Circle's money used as USDC reserves got frozen along with Silicon Valley Bank.
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