Issuers stopped the stablecoins, but they did not stop the network, and that distinction is now the central fact of the Binance hack aftermath.

USDT can be frozen by Tether, and USDC can be frozen by Circle, because a single company stands behind each token and can act on addresses holding it. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC.

Elliptic estimates the total frozen at about $2.84B, while Binance says about $3B was frozen. The scale of the intervention was large, and it showed how centralised control functions when it is available.

ETH and Bitcoin offer no equivalent lever. There is no central issuer to instruct, no company that can block those holdings at an address in the same way, and that absence changed what recovery could realistically achieve.

The timing mattered as much as the mechanism. Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX, shifting value away from tokens that could be halted.

On Aave, per LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it, showing the stolen stablecoins being used before the wider freeze took hold.

Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer, from an overall hack of about $6.3B. The freezes mattered, yet they also exposed a boundary: centralised power ends where issuer-free assets begin.