Frozen funds made headlines while unfrozen funds defined the case, and the gap between the two is the real measure of the Binance hack aftermath.

By the reported figures, Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC. Elliptic estimates the total frozen at about $2.84B, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

Those are significant sums, but the overall hack is about $6.3B, and the freeze did not reach all of it. Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

The reason is partly timing and partly structure. Before the freezes, the hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX, taking value out of the freezable category before issuers acted.

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, again moving value toward ETH.

USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, while ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power. Once value sits in those assets, an issuer freeze is no longer an available response.

The next phase, then, is not another freeze announcement. It is sustained tracing of assets no issuer controls, tracking their movement and their points of contact with exchanges and services, while the frozen portion stays halted. The freezes were significant, but they did not solve the problem, and the unfrozen billions remain the bigger story.