Following the largest issuer freeze, Circle froze about $823 million in USDC tied to the Binance hack, the second-largest freeze in the response.

For USDC holders the message is clear: the token carries an issuer switch that can stop stolen funds from moving further in that form.

Yet by the time issuers acted, about $786 million in stablecoins had already been exchanged for ETH and TRX, assets designed to operate without such a switch.

Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, estimates total frozen funds at about $2.84 billion, while Binance describes about $3 billion as frozen, in an incident estimated overall at about $6.3 billion.

LlamaRisk also records about $59.9 million in stolen USDT deposited as collateral on Aave, with about $43.8 million worth of ETH borrowed against it, evidence of stolen value circulating through lending protocols.

Elliptic estimates that about $3.33 billion in assets still sits with the attacker and cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

The Circle freeze therefore sits inside a wider lesson about limits: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, and the billions that cannot be frozen outweigh the billions that can.