Tether offers UN cooperation in developing measures to combat financial crime

What’s new? Tether has commented ona UN report that found that its USDT stablecoin is one of the most popular money laundering tools in Southeast Asia. Tether expressed disappointment with this assessment, as well as the fact that the report does not mention the company’s active cooperation with law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the company urged the UN for dialogue and offered assistance in explaining the principles of blockchain technology, as their deep understanding will allow the organization to offer more effective methods of combating financial crimes.

Press release

What else is known? Tether notes that active collaboration with the US Department of the Treasury, FBI, and Secret Service, as well as other global regulators, ensures that the USDT platform offers an unprecedented quality of monitoring that surpasses traditional banking systems. The company reiterated that the latter have been used for decades to launder huge sums of money, while USDT circulates on public blockchains, which makes “it an impractical choice for illicit activities.”

Earlier, Tether’s CTO Paolo Ardoino, responding to US Senator Cynthia Lummis’ accusations of the company’s involvement in terrorism financing, also emphasized that the share of cryptocurrencies in illegal activities is extremely small compared to fiat.

In addition, over the past few months, the company has frozen more than $300 million worth of criminal activity-related coins, as well as implemented a secondary market monitoring tool developed in conjunction with analytics company Chainalysis.

Separately, the USDT issuer noted that the UN in its report ignored the asset’s important role in emerging markets, which are “completely neglected by the global financial world simply because servicing such communities would be unprofitable for them.”

According to Tether, the UN needs to explore the potential of stablecoins to combat financial crime, rather than focusing solely on the risks.

“There are yet many more opportunities to work to stop financial crimes on blockchains and it behooves the UN to work with the industry to understand and execute modern strategies to fight financial crime. Tether will happily collaborate on such matters,” the press release says.

USDT’s share in the total volume of stablecoins reached 71%

The figure grew by 21% over 2023

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Earlier, Tether froze all USDT wallets on the US sanctions list without waiting for an order from the authorities, and also blacklisted addresses that may be linked to the Russian crypto pyramid Finiko.