Ocean Protocol Faces $250k Bounty after $120M Token Dump Allegations
The ongoing feud between Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh and Ocean Protocol Foundation took another twist, as the CEO issued a bounty for more information related to an alleged misappropriation of tokens worth millions of dollars.
Sheikh, in an X post on Tuesday, offered a $250,000 reward for more information on the signatories of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their connection to the Ocean Protocol Foundation.
A multisignature or multisig wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that requires multiple signatures to execute and process a transaction.
The $250,000 bounty offer comes days after the CEO alleged that a team wallet related to Ocean Protocol misappropriated about 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens worth about $80 million at press time.
The misappropriation occurred during the 2024 merger of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, which combined Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol and SingularityNet into a shared token framework.
Sheikh claimed that Ocean Protocol minted and transferred millions of OCEAN tokens before the merger and converted them into FET tokens before moving them to centralized exchanges without the necessary disclosures.
The feud escalated into legal threats last week, after Sheikh pledged to fund class-action lawsuits across three or more jurisdictions and called on Binance, GSR and ExaGroup to investigate.
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Binance exchange announced ceasing support for OCEAN token deposits on Thursday, but did not mention the dispute as the cause behind the decision.
The escalating dispute also affected the FET token’s price, which fell 9% in the past 24 hours and was trading at $0.25 as of 8:47 pm UTC, Cointelegraph data shows.
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Ocean Protocol moved $120 million of FET tokens to Binance and OTC providers: Bubblemaps
While Ocean Protocol denied the allegations, onchain data points to an Ocean Protocol-linked multisignature wallet converting about 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, according to blockchain data platform Bubblemaps.
“Despite the merger, Ocean Protocol team kept a large amount of $OCEAN in their wallets – supposedly for ‘community incentives’ and ‘data farming,’” wrote in a Tuesday X post, adding:
“In total, an estimated 270M $FET tokens were sent to Binance or an OTC provider […] Total value: ~$120M.”
This included 160 million FET tokens transferred to Binance and 109 million transferred to GSR Markets.
Ocean Protocol withdrew from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance on Oct. 9, with no mention of the token transfers.
On Thursday, the protocol denied the allegations and said it would prepare a formal response to the “various unfounded claims.”
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