The gap between frozen and lost defines the hack's aftermath. About $2.84B was frozen, on Elliptic's estimate, from a theft estimated at about $6.3B, and the frozen portion is immobilised, not returned.

Tether's freeze of about $1.567B in USDT and Circle's freeze of about $823M in USDC make up the bulk of that total, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, estimates a further complication: the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Early conversion shaped that outcome. The hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX before the freezes.

Lending data from LlamaRisk shows about $59.9M in stolen USDT deposited as collateral on Aave, against which about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed.

That pattern follows the assets involved. USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power.

The freezes deserve their headlines, but they did not end the problem. The bigger story is the wealth that moved beyond freezing altogether, and what that says about control in decentralised finance.