Aave functioned, in this case, as a bridge between two kinds of crypto asset. The attacker deposited about $59.9M in stolen USDT there as collateral and borrowed about $43.8M worth of ETH against it, according to figures from LlamaRisk.

On one side of that bridge stood USDT, a token whose issuer, Tether, can freeze balances. On the other stood ETH, which has no central issuer with that same power, and which therefore cannot be frozen in the same way.

The bridge was used while issuers were still responding. Tether eventually froze about $1.567B in USDT, Circle froze about $823M in USDC, and Elliptic estimates total frozen funds at about $2.84B, against Binance's figure of about $3B frozen.

The overall hack is estimated at about $6.3B, so even the larger freeze estimates leave most of the value outside issuer action. Elliptic estimates the attacker still controls about $3.33B in assets that cannot be frozen by a centralised token issuer.

What the Aave transaction demonstrates is that conversion does not need an exchange or a bank. A lending protocol can perform the transformation, taking freezable collateral and returning an asset that issuers cannot seize.

That reality complicates any recovery effort focused only on issuer freezes. Tracking and legal pressure may still matter, but the technical freeze itself stops at the boundary of issuer-controlled tokens.

The freezes were significant, and they removed a large sum from the attacker's usable stablecoin holdings. They did not, however, solve the problem, because the decentralised ecosystem provided a working bridge to assets beyond centralised control.