Overview
- The plaintiffs, who filed in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, want a judge to order Tether to reissue 344,149,759 USDT to a wallet their lawyers control.
- The motion targets tokens that Tether froze after the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions office said two Tron addresses belong to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
- The filing argues the frozen USDT count as blocked property under U.S. law, which allows victims of state-sponsored terrorism to collect against those assets.
- USDT is centrally issued, so Tether can freeze addresses, burn tokens, and mint replacements, which the plaintiffs say makes this recovery path workable in a way Bitcoin or Ether are not.
- The case, led by attorney Charles Gerstein, remains pending with no ruling, and its outcome could set a model for victims seeking to use stablecoin controls to enforce long-unpaid terrorism judgments, building on related efforts involving Arbitrum, the KelpDAO hack, and Railgun DAO.