Billions frozen, billions still missing: that is what freezing does not do. About $2.84B has been frozen, on Elliptic's estimate, in response to a hack estimated at about $6.3B, and a freeze stops movement rather than restoring funds.

The breakdown is issuer-led. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

What remains outside the freeze is larger than a footnote. Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX, moving value beyond issuer control.

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

The limit is built into the assets. USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, whereas ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power.

Issuers did something unprecedented in scale, and still the problem stands. The unfrozen billions are the dominant fact of the aftermath, and a reminder that centralised levers only reach so far.