Tether and Circle freeze about $2.4 billion in stablecoins tied to the Binance incident, but frozen is not recovered

Two stablecoin issuers did most of the freezing after Binance's incident. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company froze more than $1.57 billion in USDT, which AFP rounded to about $1.6 billion "related to a potential Binance exchange hack", and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than $800 million in USDC. Added together, that is about $2.4 billion, according to investingLive. Changpeng Zhao's first posts cited smaller numbers, about $971 million for Tether and $823 million for Circle, before the issuers gave their own totals.

Binance has said about $3 billion of assets are frozen, including $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC, per CoinDesk; AFP and investingLive reported figures of more than $2.5 billion. Reuters, via Fox Business, reported that Ripple froze about $200 million, and the sources do not say how the rest of the frozen total breaks down.

Stablecoin issuers can block tokens at the contract level, which bitcoin and ether do not allow. Arkham data cited by CoinDesk showed the attacker's wallets moving assets through Uniswap and borrowing at least 20,000 wrapped ether, about $44 million, on Aave against stolen USDT. Arkham counted nearly $1.5 billion in bitcoin and $900 million in ether in the attacker's wallets at one point, alongside about $1.5 billion in USDT and more than $800 million in USDC.