At the centre of the Binance hack fallout sits a freeze by Tether covering about $1.567 billion in USDT, the biggest single issuer action in the case so far.

The scale matters because it shows how much value a stablecoin issuer can immobilise at once when it identifies wallets connected to a theft.

Yet the freeze arrived after a major conversion had already taken place, with about $786 million in stablecoins exchanged for ETH and TRX before the blocks were applied.

Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, puts total frozen funds at about $2.84 billion, while Binance describes the frozen amount as about $3 billion, both figures falling well short of the overall hack, estimated at about $6.3 billion.

Some of the stolen USDT also passed through lending markets: per LlamaRisk, about $59.9 million was used as collateral on Aave, enabling borrowing of about $43.8 million worth of ETH.

The enduring problem, Elliptic estimates, is about $3.33 billion in assets still controlled by the attacker that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

That gap reflects a structural limit: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, whereas ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, leaving the unfrozen billions as the more consequential part of the story.