Blockaid: Blacklists Recovered Nothing in 60 Crypto Exploits

The finding cuts against a common assumption that stablecoin issuer blacklists are a meaningful recovery lever after exploits. Blockaid's data suggests the freeze-and-return cases that did work ran through governance or validator decisions, which are slower and more discretionary than an issuer-level switch. For projects holding treasury or user funds in stablecoins, the recovery calculus may hinge less on issuer cooperation than on chain-level intervention. Whether this pattern holds across a larger sample, and whether issuers dispute the framing, is the open question.