The LIF formalises emergency intervention as a stochastic optimisation problem: Total Cost = Ccentral + Rblast + Rdamage × Δt. Here, Ccentral is the standing political cost of concentrated override power, Rblast is the collateral disruption rate imposed on honest users, Rdamage is the rate at which losses accrue during an incident, and Δt is time-to-containment.
Tiered authorities outperform pure designs. A first-responder Signer Set, an accountable Delegated Body, and slower Governance for adjudication beats any single tier.
The optimal response window is under 60 minutes. The “golden hour” dominates outcomes and the distribution is bimodal (fast containment or near-total failure).
Scope-limited interventions beat protocol-wide pauses. Narrow blast radius (Account/Asset/Module) preserves liveness while improving containment reliability.
Calculator prototype notebook
The taxonomy decomposes emergency mechanisms along two axes: Scope (blast radius) and Authority (who can trigger action). The design goal is not maximal decentralization, but minimal expected cost given the protocol’s threat model and community constraints.
Scope (what can be affected): Network, Asset, Protocol, Module, Account. Narrower scope is more precise and reduces collateral disruption, but may be technically unavailable depending on architecture.
Authority (who can act): Signer Set (keys), Delegated Body (council/guardian), Governance (stake-weighted process). Faster authorities trade legitimacy for speed; slower authorities trade speed for legitimacy.
The comprehensive LIF analysis integrates all three research pillars: Threat ($78.81B, 705 cases, α ≈ 1.33), Intervention ($9.60B eligible, 26.0% CSR, 3 authority tiers), and Efficiency (82.5% golden-hour CSR, bimodal response distribution). The Scope × Authority matrix reveals 9 configurations, with Account × Delegated Body delivering the optimal balance of speed (sub-hour), legitimacy, and containment success (92%).
Ranking intervention architectures by $ saved per unit of centralisation cost reveals the Delegated Body tier as the highest-ROI investment: each council deployment requires modest governance overhead but saves $6.4M median per activation. The Signer Set tier has the lowest per-unit cost but also the lowest CSR when operating alone. The analysis recommends a tiered "escalation path"—Signer Set → Delegated Body → Governance— mirroring the findings of the stochastic cost model.
The ultimate performance metric: $2.51B preserved against $9.60B at risk (26.0% CSR), leaving a $7.09B "opportunity gap." The model predicts that deploying scope-limited Optimistic Freeze hooks across the top-100 TVL protocols would narrow this gap by 40–60%, translating to $2.8–$4.3B in additional capital preservation over the historical dataset.