Scott Melker discusses how the US has frozen $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent."The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker" airs every day at 12:00 p.m. Tune in for your daily dose of all things crypto.Make sure to also check out Yahoo Finance's new crypto hub to find the latest crypto-related news.
Now, we have a really interesting story. I would even call it a series of stories right here.
This is it. Scott says, USCs roughly 1 billion in Iranian crypto as regime nears end of their tether. No, no pun intended.
Stable coins, tether, get it?
Um, so listen, we could set the table here. You'll all probably remember that back in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
It's mind-blowing actually that that war has been going on for four years, but at the time, the US and their allies froze $300 billion in Russian bank Central uh Russian Central Bank Reserves. That was half of the 600 billion that they had total.
And it sent a signal to the world that said your central bank reserves, if they're not in your own bank or in your own asset are not in fact your central bank reserves, right?
And we've seen a lot of narratives about people trying to reduce their reliance on the US dollar, certainly with oil trade, Central Bank Reserves and gold have been massively increasing while Treasuries have reduced.
And a lot of that stems from this story.
Well, back then to uh, you know, to we'll call it freeze because they're not seized yet. We don't know what will happen with them still.
But these assets were frozen and they were obviously Russia's, that took a coalition of G7 countries and votes and multiple banks.
Now, you could just freeze their wallet as I said, right? Uh so a rough 1 billion in Iranian crypto, you just call up uh Tether or USDC or one of the issuers and you freeze those wallets and it's a wrap.
So much, much easier actually using crypto for better or for worse for the United States government to freeze and seize these assets. I mean, there's another story, it's a small one, but it speaks to the same thing.
So we had this one just the other day. This is Zama. I'm going to be clear, I've never heard of Zama, I've never heard of CUS uh DC, but Circle, which is the issuer of USDC froze 12.6 million USDC on Zama on a court order from a federal judge.
Now, it was later reversed as you can see here and the rightful thing was done. But very clear if a judge tells Circle or probably Tether in that case to freeze assets, they're going to do it.
This is not the decentralized promise of a Bitcoin, an asset that you can self- custody and hold your own keys.
This is actually hyperdollarization as I've told you through stable coins and through these assets, but also more control of governments using this technology to be able to manipulate the economic sanctions or abilities of foreign governments.
So, very interesting that they've seized a billion dollars already in assets from this regime, just an absolutely crazy number and they've used it, done it using crypto route.