Why Iran's Central Bank Held USDT?

Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned several crypto wallets linked to Iran's central bank. As a result, more than $130 million worth of USDT was frozen today.

None of this is really news anymore. Freezes like this have become routine. In fact, the GENIUS Act itself requires issuers to be able to freeze, seize, or destroy tokens upon lawful request. So what happened today isn't the exception - it's the norm. And yet, something about it still strikes me as odd.

Everyone knows that Tether can freeze any of its tokens, except those issued on the Liquid network. Ordinary users reasonably assume this won't affect them as long as they don't seriously cross someone powerful. But what were the people behind the wallets linked to Iran's central bank thinking? Surely they couldn't have believed they would be spared. So why keep their assets in USDT TRC20 instead of Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency that cannot be frozen?

I have only one theory. Few people are willing to accept Bitcoin as payment. Almost no one is willing to accept other cryptocurrencies. But USDT TRC20 has become a widely recognized and commonly used payment method. So people end up holding an asset with a greater risk of being frozen simply because it is more liquid.

That's the part I find strange. I'm not going to offer advice to Iran's central bank. They presumably know what they're doing. But there may be ordinary crypto users reading this who also feel compelled to hold a token they would rather not use simply because of its liquidity. To them, I would offer one piece of advice:

If a seller accepts only tokens you would rather not hold, that doesn't mean you need to keep those tokens yourself. You can hold whichever cryptocurrency you consider the most reliable and simply convert it at the point of payment using rabbit.io.