Coin Center research chief says prosecuting developers cannot stop immutable smart contracts

Coin Center Research Director Peter Van Valkenburgh said in a post on X that prosecuting developers cannot stop an immutable smart contract once it has already been deployed. He wrote that while the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is often seen as a kind of global financial police force, that authority does not extend to halting code that is already live and cannot be changed. Van Valkenburgh argued that conventional legal tools have clear limits when they confront immutable code. The comment came during a broader discussion about crypto regulation and the legal responsibility attached to decentralized protocols. The remarks point to a core conflict in the sector: technical systems that execute on their own versus legal frameworks built to hold identifiable people and organizations accountable. The Techub item cited @laurashin in connection with the post.