Tether announced yesterday that it will block the use of its stablecoin USDT in wallets that are subject to US sanctions. The new sanctions affect 161 Ethereum wallets, of which 150 do not even hold USDT, while the remaining 11 wallets hold over 3.5 million USDT tokens, with 3.4 million USDT held by a single address. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has linked this address to the recent hacking attack on the gambling platform Stake. Among the other wallets, two addresses hold about 20,000 USDT each, another holds nearly 60,000 USDT, and the rest hold smaller amounts, with one wallet holding only 0.16 USDT.

According to The Block, Tether stated that the company has frozen individual wallets that are subject to sanctions by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

The cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced that it now supports deposits and withdrawals of Tether (USDT) on the Optimism network.

On December 7th, Tether partnered with Bitkub, the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in Thailand, and Bitkub Academy to promote stablecoin education in Thailand.

Blockchain analysis company ChainArgos posted on social media that Tether has blacklisted 28 new wallets, which may be a daily record. These wallets have sent and received billions of USDT in value throughout their lifetimes, with $161 million coming from a single exchange.

German data center and Bitcoin mining operator Northern Data spent $360 million to purchase GPUs to support its cloud computing services. This acquisition was made after Tether provided Northern Data with $609 million in debt financing. The purchase brought the company 384 HPE Cray XD supercomputers, equipped with approximately 8,200 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. The company added that its AI cloud facility is "100% carbon neutral," addressing energy-related issues that plague AI, data centers, and Bitcoin miners.

The circulation of Tether's USDT increased by 4.5 billion in November. The blockchain intelligence platform, Arkham, confirmed this in a post on X on November 28th and pointed out that USDT worth about $3 billion was minted on the Tron network. It is worth noting that the Kraken deposit address "TQef1" minted stablecoins worth $2.5 billion during this period.

Paolo Ardoino has been appointed as the CEO of Tether, a position he assumed on December 1, 2021, after serving as the company's chief technology officer since 2017. Tether is expected to generate $4.5 billion in profits this year, and Ardoino has revealed that the company is prioritizing diversification and expansion. Tether will be focusing on becoming an infrastructure provider, and Ardoino believes that Keet, a communications app he is the chief strategy officer of, will be a significant driver of Bitcoin and USDT adoption. Tether is also investing in renewable energy and plans to construct hydropower facilities in Uruguay and geothermal facilities in El Salvador.

According to data released by Lookonchain, in November, USDT worth $5 billion was minted on Tron and Ethereum. On the Ethereum blockchain, the whale address "0x1dBb" received about 1.5 billion USDT from Tether Treasury and transferred it to an exchange. On Tron, 2.56 billion USDT was transferred from Tether Treasury to Kraken via the deposit address "TQef1n".

November 28th, Whale Alert monitoring data showed that stablecoin issuer Tether had just issued 1 billion USDT on Ethereum 10 minutes ago. Tether CEO confirmed that the issuance was authorized but not yet distributed.