After the freezes, about $3.33B is still assessed by Elliptic to be under the attacker's control in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer, a remainder that outweighs the frozen portion in the public accounting of the hack.

The frozen portion itself was not small. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT, Circle froze about $823M in USDC, and Elliptic puts the total frozen at about $2.84B, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

Much of the value had already changed form before intervention. The hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX ahead of the freezes.

On Aave, per LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT went in as collateral, and borrowing against it reached about $43.8M worth of ETH.

The full scale of the incident is estimated at about $6.3B, which puts both the frozen and the unfrozen figures in perspective.

Freezing works where an issuer stands behind the token. That is true for USDT and USDC, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, so value held in those assets cannot be halted the same way.

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