Tracing the money the freezes could not touch is now the central task in the Binance hack, because the freezes, for all their size, stopped only part of the stolen value.

Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC. Elliptic estimates the total frozen at about $2.84B, and Binance says about $3B was frozen, figures that rightly drew attention.

Attention, however, is not resolution. The overall hack is about $6.3B, and Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

The trail to that remaining sum includes early conversions. Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX, moving funds into assets beyond stablecoin issuer control.

Per LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral on Aave, with about $43.8M worth of ETH borrowed against it, documenting another step from stablecoin holdings into ETH.

The structural point is plain: USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, so the remaining assets cannot be halted by the same method.

Tracing therefore becomes the method that remains. Analysts can follow movements on public networks, flag addresses and transactions, and alert services where funds appear, even though no issuer can freeze the holdings themselves. The freezes were significant, but they did not solve the problem, and what happens to the unfrozen billions is the story to watch.