Two kinds of crypto faced two kinds of control after the Binance hack, and the difference between them explains why the freeze response had a hard limit.

On one side sit USDT and USDC, tokens issued by companies that can freeze balances at addresses. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT, and Circle froze about $823M in USDC, with Elliptic estimating the total frozen at about $2.84B and Binance saying about $3B was frozen.

On the other side sit ETH and Bitcoin, assets with no central issuer and therefore no company empowered to freeze them in the same way. That is not a gap in effort; it is a feature of how those networks are built.

The contrast became practical very quickly. Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX, moving value across the boundary from issuer-controlled tokens to assets where no issuer could intervene.

The Aave figures add another layer. Per LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it, turning frozen-eligible tokens into borrowed ETH before the freeze could contain them.

That sequence is why the headline freeze totals, large as they are, do not describe the whole case. Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Against an overall hack of about $6.3B, the remaining sum shows the limit of centralised control in a decentralised ecosystem. A freeze can halt what an issuer controls; it cannot halt what no issuer controls.