tether

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that Colombian cryptocurrency broker Leonardo de Jesus Zuluaga Duque was sentenced to 160 months in prison for assisting in the laundering of drug trafficking proceeds through Tether's USDT and participating in a scheme to import cocaine into the United States.Zuluaga Duque, along with five others, assisted in laundering approximately $14.5 million in USDT through a network of cryptocurrency accounts, shell companies, and fund transfers between the U.S. and Colombia from May to November 2023. The court also ordered the forfeiture of $14.75 million and the cryptocurrency held in four addresses under his control.

According to official news, Tether announced that it will lead the Pre-Seed round financing of the Bolivian fintech company Peso, with the specific amount undisclosed.Peso provides global USDT accounts for Latin American users, allowing them to save, spend, invest, and make cross-border remittances through the same app. Peso has integrated USDT payments on the Bolivian digital service platform Yango, enabling users to order takeout directly with USDT; in addition, Peso also offers offline payment services and virtual accounts opened in the user's name, connecting USDT with the Bolivian banking system through QR codes and ACH channels, facilitating the conversion between stablecoins and local fiat currency.This round of funding will be used to expand Peso's local fiat deposit and withdrawal channels in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina, and to advance its merchant payment network and virtual account infrastructure construction.

According to BBX data, yesterday the traditional European banking system and global digital asset giants disclosed the latest developments in retail crypto financial channels and cutting-edge computing power investments, with the core information as follows:The German Savings Bank officially opens crypto trading to retail customers, initially supporting BTC, ETH, SOL, and other cryptocurrencies: The German Savings Bank Association (DSGV) announced that starting from October 19, the first batch of participating customers from the German Savings Banks (Sparkassen) can directly buy and sell cryptocurrencies through the existing bank mobile application. Each savings bank will independently decide the specific launch time, and it is expected that 30 to 40 new savings banks will be added each month thereafter, aiming for comprehensive coverage of most interested banks in Germany by the first half of 2027.Supported cryptocurrencies and fees: The initially supported cryptocurrencies include BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, and POL. Each transaction order incurs a fixed fee of approximately $1.11 (0.99 euros);Underlying technology and compliance framework: This service is provided by DekaBank, a professional securities service provider under the savings bank group, with the underlying crypto assets being jointly compliant custodied by DekaBank and Boerse Stuttgart;Prudent business principles: DSGV clearly states that this service is only available to customers who have the willingness to make independent decisions, and the savings banks themselves do not provide any investment advice, nor will they conduct extensive active promotion across the network, and will prominently indicate the high volatility and potential total loss risks of crypto assets at the product level.Tether Capital invests in AI chip unicorn Tenstorrent's $1.5 billion Series E financing: Tether Capital, the investment arm of the global stablecoin giant, officially announced its investment in the well-known AI chip and computing architecture company Tenstorrent's $1.5 billion Series E financing. This oversubscribed financing has significantly boosted Tenstorrent's post-investment valuation to $6.2 billion. Tether's official statement indicated that this strategic investment deeply aligns with Tether's overall landscape in artificial intelligence software, robotics, and decentralized payment fields, and is highly compatible with its QVAC platform, which focuses on local AI operation on terminal devices, effectively extending its investment reach into underlying processors and cutting-edge computing hardware systems.

According to Fortune, New York-based startup Mural has completed a $15 million Series A funding round, led by Tether, with participation from North Island Ventures. This round of funding brings Mural's total financing to $28 million. Previously, the company completed a $5 million seed round in 2022.Mural was co-founded in 2022 by former Palantir engineer Sinclair Toffa (CEO) and Chris Fernandes. Its platform provides payroll service providers, software companies, and fintech firms with a single account that can hold traditional dollars, local currencies, and stablecoins simultaneously, helping businesses simplify cross-border payments and compliance processes without the need to connect with multiple banks and payment service providers.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino posted on the X platform that U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal's "analysis" of the Tether sanctions report overlooked one point: since 2023, Tether has, on average, frozen related addresses 4 weeks ahead of the formal sanctions identified by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Israeli National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF), and in 99% of cases, the freeze was completed before Chainalysis marked the related addresses.He stated that Tether's actions have led to a 94% decrease in stablecoin trading volume related to Iran. Previously, on September 28, Blumenthal released a report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stating that among 846 sanctioned wallets related to Iran and its proxies, 84% almost exclusively used USDT for transactions, and he wrote to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into Tether.

According to a report by Reuters, AI computing company Tenstorrent has completed a $1.5 billion Series E funding round, with a post-money valuation of $6.2 billion. This round of financing was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from both new and existing investors, including Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial, and XTX Markets.Tenstorrent will use this funding to deploy Galaxy servers on a large scale, continue to serve open-weight models for large language models (LLMs) and video generation, and advance its AI and CPU IP business towards licensing its own chip designs to customers.

AIsa, an enterprise AI agent infrastructure company, announced the completion of its seed round extension financing, with stablecoin issuer Tether and HIVEN joining as strategic investors. This round brings its total financing amount to over $9 million. Tether and HIVEN join existing investors such as Alibaba, Tribe Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, Draper Associates, and Saison Capital.Jordan Liu, founder and CEO of AIsa, stated that the company will build infrastructure to support global discovery, access, and payment for AI agents. AIsa's network integrates resource discovery, access, and transactions, connecting enterprise AI agents with external data, AI searches, models, APIs, software tools, and industry services, while providing permission management, usage measurement, billing, and settlement.

On October 15, Saber Money, a payment infrastructure company based in San Francisco, announced a strategic investment from Tether and Titan Fund under Hong Kong's CMCC Global, with the amount undisclosed. The company provides cross-border remittance services for financial institutions, fintech companies, and enterprises in emerging market corridors, and operates the Indian cryptocurrency exchange Mudrex. The company stated that the funds will be used to deepen existing corridors and expand into emerging markets in the Asia-Pacific and Gulf regions, focusing on obtaining local licenses and banking relationships.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that emerging markets represent the next stage of global payments, and stablecoins are the relevant infrastructure, with Saber having regulatory depth and market access in Asia and the Middle East. Shiau Sin Yen, co-founder and managing partner of Titan Fund, mentioned that Asia accounts for approximately 53% of global remittances, and cross-border B2B stablecoin payments are expected to reach $5 trillion by 2035. Saber Money CEO Edul Patel stated that the company provides stablecoin payment rails to markets such as the Asia-Pacific and Gulf for near-instant, round-the-clock settlement, and plans to expand B2B payments for vendor payments, fund management, and cross-border working capital.Saber Money has held or obtained licenses, registrations, or authorizations in Canada, the European Union, India, and Australia. Over the past nine months, payment volume has increased more than sixfold, processing billions of dollars in payments across more than 40 countries, with over 90% of payments completed within one minute. The company's backers include Y Combinator, Nexus Ventures, Tether, and Titan Fund of CMCC Global. Market data listed by the company indicates that the Asia-Pacific accounts for about 35% of global payment flows, with South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific receiving over $1 trillion annually, and the UAE expected to remit about 188 billion dirhams by 2025.

According to official news, Tether's independent investment department Tether Capital announced a strategic investment in AIsa. AIsa is a platform that provides access to and payment for data, software, and computing services for AI agents. Developers can connect AI models, data, APIs, software tools, and computing resources through a single interface, with fees supported by fiat or stablecoin settlement.AIsa stated that its platform has been running over 250,000 agents, processing more than 100 million transactions cumulatively. It can access over 5,000 APIs, skills, and models with a single key and charges based on usage. Enterprises can procure resources on demand, and service providers can integrate services into automated workflows.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that as AI agents take on more work, users need to provide service access to agents while controlling expenses. This investment continues Tether's support for agent payment infrastructure, having previously invested in NEURA Robotics and planning to integrate WDK with QVAC into robotic systems.

The stablecoin issuer Tether's Tether AI Research (referred to in the text as Tether Data, S.A. de C.V.) has released the open-source multilingual automatic speech recognition model QVAC TranscribePsy. This model has 254 million parameters and runs entirely on-device, suitable for smartphones, smart glasses, and humanoid robots, with audio not needing to be uploaded to the cloud; smart glasses can process in near real-time via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and the model can also run on the robot's onboard processor.Evaluation shows that its word error rate on the Open ASR Leaderboard is 8.02%, 6.58% on Multilingual LibriSpeech, and 21.56% on Common Voice. It outperforms the specifically mentioned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B, omniASR-CTC-1B-v2, OWSM-CTC-v4, and Whisper-Medium on Multilingual LibriSpeech. Among six tested smartphones, it is the fastest model, being 2.6 times faster than the second fastest model and 5.7 times faster than Whisper-small. The Core ML version transcribes 10 minutes of audio into 1.65 seconds on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, occupying less than half the disk space of a certain tested Core ML competitor and using 1.7 times less memory.

During the promotion of the GENIUS Act by former White House crypto advisor Bo Hines, the consulting firm Nxum, which he co-founded and holds shares in, established a business relationship with Tether. Tether paid over 6 million dollars to Nxum, with the related funds distributed among three partners.Although Hines has exited the daily operations of Nxum, he continued to discuss the act with partners via Signal during his tenure. After the GENIUS Act was signed into law in July 2025, Hines left in August and was appointed CEO of Tether's U.S. stablecoin business in September, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest.

According to official news, the stablecoin issuer Tether announced an investment in the Latin American financial infrastructure company EFY Finance's seed round financing to promote the application of USD₮ and USA₮ in the institutional sector.Tether stated that this investment aims to strengthen the connection between stablecoins and the traditional financial system, supporting EFY Finance in developing cross-border payment, account services, and digital asset custody infrastructure based on stablecoins.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that many regions in Latin America are facing inflation and capital control pressures, and dollar stablecoins are becoming a tool for accessing dollar liquidity, while compliant infrastructure and banking connections are key to expanding applications.EFY Finance currently offers deposit/withdrawal services for USD₮ and USA₮, over-the-counter trading (OTC), wallet, and payment card services, covering local settlement channels for more than 12 currencies and 17 countries. The company has obtained a digital asset service provider license in El Salvador and serves over 25,000 individual and corporate accounts.

Account @blockchainchick stated that Tether's USDT contract has included the destroyBlackFunds function since its deployment on Ethereum in 2017. This function first confirms that the address has been blacklisted, then reads its balance, sets the balance to zero, deducts the corresponding amount from the total supply, and records the event, with no function available to reverse it.The account mentioned that the relevant blacklist function names the target address as _evilUser, and only Tether's multi-signature owners can invoke it on Ethereum and Tron. It also stated that Tether can subsequently mint an equivalent amount of USDT to the selected address, keeping the net supply unchanged; the U.S. Department of Justice described this process in a March 2025 forfeiture case in Massachusetts, involving approximately $9,016,612 USDT. The account also claimed that USDC can restrict wallets but cannot destroy balances, and believes this mechanism has been operating on Tron and Ethereum with owners, while Bitcoin does not have this feature.

On October 8, 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the chief member of the minority party of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman Brandon Lutnick, requesting the preservation of documents and answers regarding the company's relationship with the stablecoin issuer Tether. The deadline for responses to the five-page letter is October 23, 2026. This request comes from the minority party of the subcommittee, is part of an investigative inquiry, and is not a law enforcement order, nor does it constitute a determination against Cantor, nor does it alter the operation or redemption of USDT.The letter states that since President Trump took office again, the valuation of Cantor's 5% stake in Tether has risen from $600 million to an estimated $10 billion, with Cantor earning tens of millions of dollars each year for holding assets on behalf of Tether; former Cantor Chairman and current Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has profited over $250 million during the same period, including a $192 million distribution from Cantor. The page notes that the above content reflects allegations and estimates made by the senator, and does not represent conclusions drawn from this request. Blumenthal also wrote that Tether claims to operate in El Salvador, but the vast majority of its assets are in the U.S., held by Cantor.

According to The Defiant, the stablecoin issuer Tether has blacklisted four THORChain treasury addresses, which collectively hold approximately 1.45 million USDT.As a result, THORChain's Tron cross-chain exchanges and liquidity provider-related operations have been suspended. THORChain co-founder Chad Barraford stated that the team did not receive any prior notice before Tether took action.

According to MistTrack monitoring, Tether has frozen a large amount of USDT on certain addresses related to the Ledger user funds theft incident, which has resulted in losses nearing 90 million dollars. It is reported that some affected users have contacted MistTrack for assistance, and their team is following up. Previously, Ledger stated that it is investigating the theft incident involving user funds related to the Southeast Asian dealer CryptoBillis.

Senior Democratic member of the U.S. Senate investigators, Senator Richard Blumenthal, is continuing to investigate the financial relationship of the stablecoin issuer Tether and has written to Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Brandon Lutnick, requesting information regarding the relationship between the two companies.Brandon Lutnick is the son of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. After Howard Lutnick joined President Donald Trump's administration, Brandon Lutnick took over his leadership role at Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald holds and manages Tether's reserve assets in the U.S., and there are several other business interests between the two parties.

OKX will launch the Tether USDT Flash Earn Lite event on October 9 at 15:00. Participants can share a reward of 280,000 USDT by subscribing to ETH. The event will end on October 14 at 15:00.

Tether announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK) and the Almaty City Administration (ACA), where the three parties will explore cooperation opportunities in areas such as stablecoin applications, asset tokenization, and decentralized finance.