A freeze is not a reversal, and the Binance hack response shows exactly what stablecoin controls can do, and where they stop.

What they can do is substantial. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT, Circle froze about $823M in USDC, Elliptic estimates the total frozen at about $2.84B, and Binance says about $3B was frozen.

That power rests on centralisation. USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers because a company controls the token and can act against addresses holding it.

What they cannot do is reach ETH and Bitcoin in the same way. Those assets have no central issuer with that power, so a freeze order from a token company has no equivalent target there.

The hacker exploited that boundary early. Before the freezes, about $786M in stablecoins was converted into ETH and TRX, carrying value beyond the reach of issuer action.

Per LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral on Aave, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it, another route from freezable collateral to ETH that an issuer could not freeze.

Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer, within an overall hack of about $6.3B. The freezes were significant, but they did not solve the problem, because in a decentralised ecosystem, centralised control has a defined edge.