A freeze of about $1.567 billion in USDT by Tether dominates the issuer response to the Binance hack, yet most of the stolen value was never within freezing distance.

USDT is freezeable precisely because Tether, as issuer, can block tainted holdings, and the size of this block shows that mechanism working at full stretch.

Timing, however, shaped the outcome: before the freeze, the attacker turned about $786 million in stablecoins into ETH and TRX.

Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, estimates that total frozen funds reached about $2.84 billion, while Binance gives a figure of about $3 billion, neither closing the gap to the overall hack estimate of about $6.3 billion.

On Aave, LlamaRisk traces about $59.9 million in stolen USDT placed as collateral, against which about $43.8 million worth of ETH was borrowed, an illustration of how quickly stolen stablecoins can be put to use elsewhere.

Above all, Elliptic estimates the attacker still holds about $3.33 billion in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

That residual holding is why the freeze, significant as it is, does not solve the problem: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, and the decentralised parts of the ecosystem remain outside centralised reach.