Tether froze about $1.567 billion in USDT tied to the Binance hack, a sweeping intervention that still left billions beyond the reach of any issuer.

Issuers can act decisively on their own tokens, and this freeze demonstrates that power at its largest scale in this incident.

The limit appeared in what happened beforehand: about $786 million in stablecoins was converted into ETH and TRX, shifting value into assets with no central authority able to freeze them.

DeFi activity added another layer, with LlamaRisk reporting about $59.9 million in stolen USDT deposited as collateral on Aave and about $43.8 million worth of ETH borrowed against that position.

Elliptic estimates total frozen funds at about $2.84 billion, while Binance says about $3 billion was frozen, both estimates set against an overall hack of about $6.3 billion.

Elliptic further estimates that about $3.33 billion in assets remains under the attacker's control and cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

The lesson is not that freezes are meaningless, but that they are partial: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, ETH and Bitcoin cannot be frozen in the same way, and in a decentralised ecosystem centralised control stops where issuer control ends.