Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that the United States intends to seize roughly $1 billion in cryptocurrency tied to Iran this week, a move that would roughly double the amount the administration says it has already captured since April. The remark, delivered at the Newsmax Policy Summit, signals an acceleration of the financial pressure campaign that began after Iran’s latest military conflict started in February.
The Thursday announcement
Bessent told host Greta Van Susteren that authorities have located the assets and are “isolating them.” He did not specify whether the seizure would target particular exchanges, rely on stablecoin issuers to freeze tokens, or proceed through court orders against identifiable wallets. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said in August it was pursuing crypto venues that facilitate transfers to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but the secretary offered no update on which entities are now in the crosshairs.
What the numbers show
In an April interview Bessent claimed a $500 million haul of Iran-linked crypto. Tether disclosed in September that it had frozen $550 million of USDT during 2026 at the direction of US authorities, with $344 million of that total blocked in April alone. If the new $1 billion figure materializes, the cumulative amount identified by the government and its stablecoin partners would reach at least $1.55 billion, though the overlap between the secretary’s two public estimates and Tether’s reported freezes is not clear from the disclosures.
The stablecoin connection
Tether’s September statement is the only on-chain verification available so far. The issuer did not break down how much of the frozen USDT remains under control versus how much has been transferred to government wallets. Bessent’s latest comment does not mention Tether or any other issuer by name, leaving open whether the upcoming seizure draws from the same pool of frozen tokens or represents a separate tranche held outside the major stablecoin networks.
What remains unclear
The Treasury has not published wallet addresses, transaction hashes, or a legal docket for the anticipated action. Without those details, market participants cannot independently confirm the scale, custody status, or jurisdictional basis of the assets Bessent described. The next test will be whether the department produces a public designation or court filing that matches the billion-dollar figure to identifiable blockchain activity.