The Binance hack became a test of two opposing ideas in crypto: centralised control and decentralised escape. Before the freezes, about $786M in stablecoins was converted into ETH and TRX, assets no issuer can freeze.

The escape route worked because of a basic difference in design. Tether can freeze USDT and Circle can freeze USDC, but ETH and TRX, like Bitcoin, have no central issuer with that same power, so conversion alone was enough to leave issuer control behind.

Issuers still froze a great deal. Tether froze about $1.567B in USDT, Circle froze about $823M in USDC, and Elliptic estimates about $2.84B was frozen in total, while Binance says about $3B was frozen.

The overall hack is estimated at about $6.3B, so the frozen total, on either estimate, leaves a large remainder. Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

Another escape route ran through Aave, where per LlamaRisk about $59.9M in stolen USDT was deposited as collateral and about $43.8M worth of ETH was borrowed against it. The mechanism differed, but the destination was the same: ETH beyond issuer reach.

These routes do not depend on exotic techniques. Conversion and collateralised borrowing are everyday functions of the crypto ecosystem, available to any user, and in this case they were used to preserve stolen value.

The freezes were significant, and they show centralised control working at scale within its own domain. They did not solve the problem, because the decentralised escape route, demonstrated by the conversion into ETH and TRX, remains open and holds the larger share of the story.