Besent: US freezes over $130 million worth of Iranian digital assets

[Tether Freezes 4 TRON Wallets Linked to Iranian Sanctioned Entities, Involving $131 Million] According to on-chain investigator Specter, Tether has frozen 4 TRON chain wallets holding approximately $131 million USDT in total. These funds were withdrawn from DTC Pay and Bitso and are linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and the Central Bank of Iran, both listed on the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list.

According to the Financial Times, Circle banned the Tether backed cryptocurrency fund Heka Funds at the end of 2023 on suspicion of manipulating the USDC market. In 2024, Heka Funds filed an arbitration claim for approximately $49 million in lost profits due to account suspension. In February of this year, the arbitrator rejected all of Heka Funds' claims, found them to have engaged in malicious behavior, and ordered them to pay Circle approximately $166000 in legal and expert fees.

Rob Witoff, the head of Coinbase platform, stated that currently 95% to 100% of the company's code is written or assisted by big language models, and almost all employees use AI every day. AI agents have taken on the coding workload equivalent to about 1200 employees. Coinbase laid off about 700 employees in May this year, accounting for approximately 14% of its total workforce.

According to Forbes, Oracle founder Larry Ellison's assets decreased by $124.8 billion, or approximately 186 trillion Korean won. On the 1st of last month, Oracle's stock price was $250, but on the 13th it fell to $133. Larry Ellison's assets dropped to $175.2 billion, ranking eighth and lower than NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun's $176.3 billion. Oracle has signed a $300 billion contract with OpenAI, invested $55.7 billion in AI data centers, and plans to invest an additional $70 billion. Standard&Poor's downgraded Oracle's credit rating to BBB - on the 9th.

According to Xinhua News Agency, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran issued a statement on the 15th stating that as long as the United States continues to launch attacks on Iran, the region will not export "a drop of oil" and natural gas.