Circle froze about $823 million in USDC after the Binance hack, an action that illustrates both the strength and the boundary of stablecoin issuer controls.

On the strength side, an issuer can act on its token directly, freezing flagged holdings and preventing their onward use as USDC.

On the boundary side, the attacker had already converted about $786 million in stablecoins into ETH and TRX before the freeze, placing that value outside issuer authority.

Stolen USDT also reached Aave, where per LlamaRisk about $59.9 million was deposited as collateral and about $43.8 million worth of ETH was borrowed against it.

Elliptic estimates total frozen funds at about $2.84 billion, while Binance says about $3 billion was frozen, against an overall hack estimate of about $6.3 billion.

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

That is why Circle's freeze, though substantial, does not solve the problem: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, and centralised control in a decentralised ecosystem only ever covers part of the loss.