When coins are stolen, it is not a company’s goodwill that decides whether the proceeds can be frozen. It is the way the token was built. The past few days have shown that with unusual clarity. The attacker who drained assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the trading platform Bitget was able to move roughly 83 million dollars in XRP without obstruction. Ripple has no instrument against it. Stablecoins were a different story: there the issuers stepped in, but only for a vanishingly small share of the total.

For you as a holder, that raises a question worth answering before your next purchase: which of your holdings could anyone freeze at all, and who would that be? The answer differs for native coins and issued tokens, and…