Elliptic says about $3.33B from the hack cannot be frozen, because the attacker holds it in assets that no centralised token issuer controls, and that single estimate reframes what the freeze campaign actually achieved.

What issuers could freeze, they did freeze in large amounts. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC, for a total frozen of about $2.84B on Elliptic's estimate, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

The conversion step came first. Before the freezes, the hacker turned about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX.

Lending markets were also involved. According to LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral on Aave, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against that deposit.

Against an overall hack of about $6.3B, the frozen amount leaves a wide remainder, and Elliptic's unfrozen estimate accounts for much of it.

The reason is architectural rather than procedural. USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, while ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power.

So the freezes were significant but did not solve the problem. The unfrozen billions are the bigger story, and they illustrate the limits of centralised control in a decentralised ecosystem.