Centralised freezes stop at the edge of a $3.33B pile. Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, estimates the attacker still controls about that amount in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Inside that boundary, issuers moved decisively. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT, Circle froze about $823M in USDC, and Elliptic estimates the total frozen at about $2.84B, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

Outside it, conversion had already done its work. Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX.

The Aave trail, per LlamaRisk, shows about $59.9M in stolen USDT deposited as collateral, with about $43.8M worth of ETH borrowed against it.

The hack as a whole is estimated at about $6.3B, a scale that makes clear why a freeze total in the high billions still leaves so much outstanding.

USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, and that difference draws the line between what could be stopped and what could not.

Significant as the freezes were, they left the core problem intact. Most of the stolen value now sits where no token issuer can touch it, and that gap is the real lesson of this hack.