Exchanges and casinos block ips from the United States but everyone just uses a VPN, why even block their ips in the first place when you know they are going to do it anyways. I'm guessing they do it so they have some type of deniability?
It's not going to be popular thing to admit to, but yes, it is a form of showing regulators or authorities, in the event that these somehow get questioned, that they did have measures in place to comply. It's actually quite a strange case to me because they're not exactly compliant in any case, but it's a sort of cover their ass situation.
To be fair, the services I use who block IPs would never use that (VPN) as reason to block and confiscate.