Tether moved against about $1.567 billion in USDT connected to the Binance hack, the largest single freeze recorded in the aftermath.

For observers of stablecoin governance, the episode is a test case in what issuer intervention can achieve and where it stops.

Before issuers acted, about $786 million in stablecoins had been converted into ETH and TRX, moving value beyond the toolkit of any token issuer.

Lending platforms also featured in the flow of funds: LlamaRisk reports about $59.9 million in stolen USDT deposited as collateral on Aave, with about $43.8 million worth of ETH borrowed against it.

Elliptic estimates total frozen assets at about $2.84 billion, while Binance reports about $3 billion frozen, in a hack estimated overall at about $6.3 billion.

The balance that remains is stark: Elliptic estimates about $3.33 billion in assets still controlled by the attacker that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

That is the broader lesson of the Tether freeze: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, so the unfrozen billions, not the frozen sum, define the unresolved challenge.