#CryptoRoundTableRemarks Code, Custody, and the Grammar of Freedom

Paul Atkins, in his recent remarks at the roundtable, offered a view that reaches well beyond the immediate confines of financial regulation. By arguing that engineers should not be held responsible for how others use the code they write, he reopened an old and fundamental question, one that concerns the relationship between authorship and accountability in a world increasingly shaped by systems rather than decisions.

This is no longer merely a technical or regulatory matter. What decentralised finance brings to the fore is a deeper philosophical shift. When a contract executes on-chain, it does not deliberate, it does not interpret, it does not err in the human sense. It performs. And yet this performance, being irreversible and consequential, demands some form of ethical and legal framing. The question, then, is not who intended what, but who constructed the space in which such actions became possible.

Atkins’s reference to self-custody and the publication of code as expressions of individual freedom recalls earlier European debates on liberty, property, and the right to act without interference. In many ways, the open repository has become what the pamphlet once was: a means of asserting intellectual autonomy, not through protest or rhetoric, but through logic and design.

The act of holding one’s assets without an intermediary is not a quirk of software architecture. It is an affirmation of personal agency in the digital domain. To undermine this right through regulatory ambiguity is to decide, albeit indirectly, that individuals are not to be trusted with autonomy when it assumes a new form.

It would be a mistake, however, to portray this development as either revolutionary or inherently emancipatory. Decentralised systems will not replace institutions, nor will they eliminate the need for governance. What they do, rather, is rearrange the terrain on which participation takes place. They move us from procedural oversight to structural authorship, from negotiation to composition.

Law,