Freezing stolen stablecoins sounds great. Until you think about who holds that switch.

So after the Binance hack, stablecoin issuers stepped in and froze a pretty massive amount of tokens linked to the theft.

And sure, stopping thieves from moving stolen money is a good thing.

Not going to argue against that.

But the same feature that lets an issuer freeze a hacker's wallet also lets that issuer freeze somebody else's.

That's quite a lot of control for a private company.

I know this isn't exactly news to anyone who's looked into USDC or USDT. They've never been the same thing as holding a fully permissionless asset.

Still, seeing hundreds of millions of dollars frozen in an actual incident makes it feel less theoretical.

What bothers me isn't necessarily the decision to freeze stolen funds.

It's how little most users probably know about who can make that decision, what evidence they need, and how an innocent person gets an account unfrozen.

That part deserves a lot more attention.