A freeze of about $2.84B halts movement without restoring losses. That is the central fact of the response to a hack estimated at about $6.3B: immobilised funds are not recovered funds.

Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC, accounting for the frozen total on Elliptic's estimate, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

The remainder is not a rounding difference. Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Before any freeze could bite, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX.

LlamaRisk adds that about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral on Aave, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it.

Only issuer-backed tokens can be frozen this way. USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power.

The freezes were significant, yet they did not solve the problem. The unfrozen billions are the bigger story, and a lesson about the limits of centralised control in a decentralised ecosystem.