09-03-2026 
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Tether is taunting stablecoin rival Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) over the latter’s new football deal, while a new lawsuit is challenging Tether’s right to freeze and seize users’ tokens.
- USDChelsea leads to USDTaunting
- Tether sued by alleged pig butcherers who want their USDT unfrozen
- Argentines find it’s getting cheaper to trade pesos for stablecoins
- IMF warns of stablecoin threat to emerging economies
- New global bank consortium plans G7 currency stablecoins
On August 28, Circle Internet Group (NASDAQ: CRCL) announced that it had struck a deal to become a Principal Partner and official front-of-shirt partner of the English Premier League’s (EPL) Chelsea Football Club. Terms of the deal, which coincided with Chelsea’s first match of the 2026-27 EPL season against Brighton last Sunday (a 4-3 victory for the Blues), weren’t disclosed.
The deal breaks new ground as the message ‘USDC by Circle’ will feature prominently on the front of Chelsea’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy shirts, marking the first such stablecoin appearance in the world’s biggest professional sports league. It doesn’t hurt that Circle’s corporate logo is a similar blue to Chelsea’s iconic colors.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire was understandably chuffed by the announcement, saying USDC was built on the belief that “money should work seamlessly for everyone everywhere” and the Chelsea deal “connects us with a global sports community built on that exact same borderless vision.”
Chelsea FC president Jason Gannon said the partnership “positions Chelsea at the forefront of football’s digital evolution. We are two organizations fixated by the future and are relentlessly innovating to be in the best position possible for the long-term.”
Allaire went on to tweet images from Sunday’s match, including Chelsea’s opening goal, but not everyone was as impressed by Circle’s EPL coup. Samson Mow, a former Blockstream exec who’s cozy with Circle’s chief rival Tether (issuer of the market-leading stablecoin USDT), tweeted: “Remember FTX and all their splashy big money sponsorships?”
That’s a reference to the defunct FTX exchange, which inked a number of high-priced sponsorship deals before collapsing under the weight of its massive financial fraud (for which founder/CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year sentence).
But Mow’s tweet also included a snarky AI video in which execs from an unspecified blue-shirted football club reflect on sponsors that came and went, namechecking FTX. In case anyone missed the point, the video also featured a bald Allaire lookalike backing a truck full of money up to the club’s stadium, then emerging with two ‘money-cannons’ firing American dollar bills into the air.
The video asked the question “what you could actually do with that amount of money” before promoting Tether’s solar-battery electricity initiatives in Africa. Mow’s tweet was retweeted by Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino without additional comment.
Tether’s eagerness to mock Circle’s Chelsea deal is just the latest salvo in the ongoing feud between the two largest stablecoin companies (USDT’s current market cap is $183.3 billion, USDC’s is $73.7 billion, with USDS a distant third at ~$10 billion).
A year ago, Ardoino made a veiled reference to Circle by accusing unnamed competitors of having “tried to kill us.” That followed 2024 comments by Circle’s senior policy director Caroline Hill, who urged the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee to combat illicit stablecoin activity by targeting stablecoin issuers’ “U.S. touch points,” a not-so-subtle reference to Tether’s deep ties with Wall Street financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ: ZCFITX).
Tether has its own football history, having acquired an ownership stake in Italy’s Serie A mainstays Juventus FC that currently sits at ~10%. In December 2025, Tether’s €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) offer to acquire the majority stake in Juventus held by the Agnelli family’s investment firm Exor NV was rejected by the family.
(In an interesting bit of timing, CNBC launched a video series a couple of weeks ago recapping the crypto sector’s checkered history of football sponsorships. The first episode charted the rise of such deals, while the second focused on the ensuing crash. The upcoming third episode may address the Chelsea-USDC deal.)
In June, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned football clubs that “a number of unauthorized firms, including crypto businesses and trading platforms, are using sponsorship to target unwitting football fans.” But Circle’s U.K. offshoot Circle UK Trading Limited obtained an electronic money issuer (EMI) license from the FCA in 2018.
Tether sued for freezing out alleged pig butcherers
Both Circle and Tether have been widely criticized for their slow responses in helping victims of stablecoin-related crime by using the issuers’ centralized capacity to freeze specific tokens on whatever network they reside. Tether, which only belatedly acknowledged its responsibilities to stablecoin holders following years of pressure from U.S. law enforcement agencies, has of late proven more responsive than Circle.
Circle insists that, for its own legal protection, it is powerless to freeze anyone’s USDC in the absence of a court order. Tether has frozen billions’ worth of USDT at the request of various law enforcement agencies, a policy that has now resulted in Tether being sued by owners of frozen USDT.
On August 31, two Thai nationals (Nutthawat Rukthammachalern and Natthawat Kasamvilas) filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against four different Tether entities. The suit accuses Tether of freezing $42.4 million worth of USDT in digital wallets on the Ethereum network “at the informal request of a U.S. government agent, without any warrant, order, or legal process of any kind.”
The plaintiffs claim Tether froze their USDT last October using the ‘addBlackList’ feature of the Tether smart contract, despite the fact that U.S. authorities didn’t obtain the necessary warrant until this February.
The suit claims U.S. authorities also directed Tether to “issue new USDT in the same amount into a government-controlled wallet.” The plaintiffs say their USDT remains frozen and Tether “stand[s] ready, according to the government’s seizure warrant, to destroy Plaintiffs’ property outright.”
Worse, the plaintiffs point out that, since Tether holds “interest-bearing financial instruments” in the reserve assets representing the USDT in question, Tether is “profiting directly from the freeze itself.” The plaintiffs claim it’s in Tether’s “economic interest to freeze, and indeed to destroy, USDT; the freeze costs [Tether] nothing” while continuing to generate interest income for Tether.
The plaintiffs claim that the defendants “intentionally do not disclose in their marketing or otherwise to secondary holders of USDT that Defendants have the technological capability to freeze or destroy” USDT. The alleged subterfuge is necessary because to state this capability upfront “would greatly diminish” Tether’s commercial prospects.
The plaintiffs argue that they have no contractual relationship with Tether, having obtained their USDT via the secondary market. Furthermore, the terms of sale and service listed on Tether’s website stated that these terms apply exclusively to users of the tether.io website, not those who acquire USDT on the secondary market.
The suit was filed in the SDNY due to it being the home of Tether’s T-bill custodian, Cantor Fitzgerald, which also holds a ~5% stake in Tether. The plaintiffs are seeking not only the return of their USDT but also damages, interest and costs.
Tether issued a statement calling the suit “a baseless attempt to interfere with Tether’s important work with global law enforcement, including the Department of Justice, to prevent the unlawful use of USDT.”
Before anyone cries ‘shame’ too loud at the plaintiffs’ plight, it’s been reported that the USDT in question was flagged as part of a North Carolina investigation into a ‘pig butchering’ scam, the kind of digital fraud with which USDT has become inextricably linked.
Regardless, the suit will undoubtedly spark more debate about government seizure/forfeiture of digital assets, particularly in light of the nearly four-month gap between this freeze/seize and the obtaining of the warrant ordering such actions.
Argentines trade pesos for stablecoins as cost premium fades
In terms of stablecoins’ positive use cases, Tether has made much of USDT’s role as a dollar substitute in emerging markets where the value of local currencies can fluctuate wildly. Like Argentina, where 94.3% of peso-based crypto trading is used to buy dollar-backed stablecoins, the highest share among major currencies tracked by analytics firm Artemis, and a full 10 points higher than runner-up Mexico.
That figure was included in a recent report from the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) (NASDAQ: ZADIHX) venture capital group on how Argentinians use stablecoins. In a country long plagued by hyperinflation and currency controls, stablecoins offer a means of preserving value without the need to store paper bills under one’s mattress.
But while the cost to acquire USDT using Argentine pesos traditionally came at a steep premium to the official rate for buying real dollars with pesos, that gap has narrowed significantly since April 2025, when Argentina lifted most restrictions on dollar purchases. In April 2023, buying USDT with pesos cost 93% more than buying an actual dollar. As of July 2026, that premium had narrowed to just 4%.Regardless, digital wallet downloads continue to climb, with the figures for the first two quarters of 2026 showing significant gains over the same periods in recent years, despite the inflation rate coming down to manageable levels over that span.
IMF warns of dollar-stablecoin threat to emerging markets
One risk of stablecoins becoming too popular in emerging countries is the erosion of government control over monetary policy. The European Central Bank (ECB) has warned about the threat to its “control over monetary conditions” from the rising popularity of dollar-backed stablecoins. The ECB has thus called for more support for “credible euro alternatives” in the digital space.
At last week’s Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Kristalina Georgieva offered her perspective on the challenges of Navigating a Financially More Fluid World.
Georgieva said blockchain tech was “still a small experiment in a vast global payments picture,” but it is “certainly possible” that stablecoins and tokenization “on their own merit and by stoking competition—will ‘fluidify’ global finance, with stablecoins in particular showing potential to make large-value cross-border payments cheaper and faster.” However, a more fluid global financial system also means “the transmission of risks is faster and the penalty on policy error is larger.”
Georgieva laid out her three stablecoin “policy requirements for success,” starting with the need for “an internationally coordinated regulatory policy response,” although she noted this will be “a heavy lift given geopolitical fragmentation.”
Georgieva said trust in the redeemability of privately issued stablecoins will require “strict rules on reserve pools to ensure safety and liquidity, ideally harmonized internationally to support a single, recognizable asset class.”
Georgieva alluded to the debate currently raging stateside over whether stablecoin ‘yield/rewards’ will negatively impact banks’ capacity to offer new loans. Georgieva called for a “level playing field” for financial products lest banks find their costs rising and their deposits draining “to the point of impairing economy-wide credit.”
Second, Georgieva warned that stablecoins could negatively impact capital controls in emerging markets, exposing these countries to “currency substitution risks, capital flow volatility, exchange rate instability, and a reduction of monetary sovereignty.”
Central banks might need to establish “larger foreign exchange buffers and strict policy discipline” to mitigate this impact. Domestic stablecoin intermediaries need to be appropriately regulated, and governments need to watch for stablecoins serving as a vehicle for tax evasion.
Third, Georgieva turned to America, which—since the vast majority of stablecoins are dollar-backed—has reaped the benefits of stablecoin issuers buying U.S. Treasury bills as reserve assets. But Georgieva warned that so-called “issuer countries will not be absolved of the foundational need for policy discipline,” pointing out that U.S. 10-year sovereign bond yields are currently the highest they’ve been in two decades.
With America’s national debt now topping $40 trillion, Georgieva said the U.S. shouldn’t look to stablecoins as a means of avoiding the “fiscal heavy lifting” that comes with getting one’s financial house in order. “In far too many places, these choices are yet to be made. Out advice: delay no longer.”
New global bank consortium to issue G7 currency-based stablecoins
Countering dollar-backed stablecoins’ threat to European Union monetary sovereignty was part of the justification behind Qivalis, the 37-member consortium of some of the EU’s largest bankers behind a new euro-backed stablecoin (debut expected later this year). Qivalis CEO Jan-Oliver Sell is on record saying the consortium’s goal is to “build a cornerstone of European digital autonomy,” without which, “we will face dollarization.”
And yet, some Qivalis members are among a new global consortium of 21 leading financial institutions that doesn’t yet have a name, but does have plans to launch a new dollar-backed stablecoin in H1 2027.
The 21 members, which include Qivalis members like Spain’s BBVA (NASDAQ: BBVA) and the Netherlands-based Rabobank, “have committed to establish a new company … to support the issuance of a stablecoin solution.”
The nameless entity “intends to operate globally, with its initial focus on a USD‑denominated stablecoin offering and a longer‑term ambition of expanding issuance into stablecoins denominated in additional G7 currencies, with a EUR offering as a priority.”
Whenever they arrive, the consortium assures us that the new tokens will be compliant with America’s GENIUS Act and the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) rules.
The North American banks involved in the project are Bank of America (NASDAQ: BAC), Capital One (NASDAQ: COF), Citi (NASDAQ: C), Fidelity Investments (NASDAQ: FIS), Goldman Sachs (NASDAQ: GS), PNC Financial Services (NASDAQ: PNC), Scotiabank, TD Bank Group, Wells Fargo (NASDAQ: WFC), and WisdomTree. The European banks not listed above are Banco Santander (NASDAQ: SAN), Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank (NASDAQ: DB), Lloyds Banking Group (NASDAQ: LYG), and UBS (NASDAQ: UBS). Also participating are Japan’s MUFG Bank (NASDAQ: MUFG), Abu Dhabi’s Sirius International Holding, and South Africa’s Standard Bank.
This week’s update follows an October announcement by 10 of the 21 banks that they were exploring “whether a new industry-wide offering could bring the benefits of digital assets and enhance competition across the market, while ensuring full compliance with regulatory requirements and best practice risk management.”
Stablecoin consortiums are all the rage these days. In July, a who’s who of banks, businesses and blockchain firms announced their support for Open USD (OUSD), a “shared stablecoin for global financial activity” that plans to launch “later this year.”
Notably absent from the new consortium is US banking giant JPMorgan (NASDAQ: JPM), which is apparently focused on its own stablecoin/‘deposit token’ JPM Coin. Also absent is U.S. Bancorp (NASDAQ: USB), another entity tinkering with its own stablecoin on the Stellar payments network. France’s Société Générale (NASDAQ: SCGLY) issues the euro-backed EURCV but belongs to neither Qivalis nor the new global consortium.
It remains to be seen whether these solo efforts might prove more durable than the consortiums. It’s also debatable whether any of these dollar-backed efforts might ever rise to a level where they’re able to loosen the stranglehold currently held on this market by USDT and USDC.
Watch: Blockchain revolution in big banks
