Circle has locked about $823 million of stolen USDC in the Binance case, a freeze that ranks second in size among issuer actions so far.

The move shows the practical effect of issuer control over a stablecoin: once addresses are flagged, the tokens they hold can be made unusable.

Losses, however, were already spreading beyond that control, since the hacker had swapped about $786 million in stablecoins for ETH and TRX before the freezes landed.

Another strand involved decentralised lending, where LlamaRisk says about $59.9 million in stolen USDT was posted as collateral on Aave and about $43.8 million worth of ETH was borrowed against it.

Elliptic estimates about $2.84 billion in total frozen funds, a total Binance puts at about $3 billion, while the hack overall is estimated at about $6.3 billion.

What Elliptic estimates remains with the attacker, about $3.33 billion in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer, is larger than the frozen total itself.

That comparison frames the Circle freeze accurately: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, and centralised freezes alone cannot unwind a theft that has already crossed into decentralised assets.