Freezing about $2.84B leaves the larger loss untouched. The hack is estimated at about $6.3B, and the frozen assets are stopped in place, not returned, which is why the freeze total cannot be read as a recovery total.

Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT and Circle froze about $823M in USDC, per the issuer actions behind Elliptic's estimate, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, further estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

The hacker converted about $786M in stablecoins into ETH and TRX before the freezes, a step that moved value out of freezable form.

According to LlamaRisk, about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral on Aave, and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it.

USDT and USDC can be frozen by their issuers, but ETH and Bitcoin have no central issuer with that same power, so the freeze mechanism covers only part of the asset mix.

Large as the frozen totals are, they are only part of the picture. The assets no issuer can freeze make up the larger share of the story, and they define what recovery still has to confront.