The ongoing dispute between Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh and the Ocean Protocol Foundation took a new turn, as Sheikh offered a bounty for information regarding an alleged misappropriation of tokens valued at millions.
In an X post on Tuesday, Sheikh announced a $250,000 reward for insights related to the signatories of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their ties to the Ocean Protocol Foundation.
A multisignature wallet, or multisig wallet, is a cryptocurrency wallet requiring multiple signatures for transaction execution.
This $250,000 bounty follows Sheikh’s claim that a team wallet associated with Ocean Protocol misappropriated roughly 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens, approximating $80 million at the time of reporting.
The alleged misappropriation transpired during the 2024 merger of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, which united Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNet under a shared token framework.
Sheikh accused Ocean Protocol of minting and transferring millions of OCEAN tokens prior to the merger and converting them into FET tokens before transferring them to centralized exchanges without the appropriate disclosures.
The dispute escalated into legal threats last week when Sheikh promised to support class-action lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions and urged Binance, GSR, and ExaGroup to investigate.
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Binance exchange announced it would cease support for OCEAN token deposits on Thursday, though it did not cite the ongoing dispute as the reason for this decision.
The intensifying dispute impacted the FET token’s price, which dropped by 9% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.25 as of 8:47 pm UTC, according to Cointelegraph data.
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Ocean Protocol moved $120M of FET tokens to Binance and OTC providers: Bubblemaps
While Ocean Protocol refuted the allegations, onchain data suggests that an Ocean Protocol-associated multisignature wallet converted around 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, as reported by blockchain data platform Bubblemaps.
“Despite the merger, the Ocean Protocol team retained a significant amount of $OCEAN in their wallets – allegedly for ‘community incentives’ and ‘data farming,’” stated a Tuesday X post, which continued:
“In total, an estimated 270M $FET tokens were sent to Binance or an OTC provider […] Total value: ~$120M.”
This involved 160 million FET tokens transferred to Binance and 109 million to GSR Markets.
Ocean Protocol withdrew from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance on Oct. 9, without addressing the token transfers.
On Thursday, the protocol denied the allegations and mentioned it would prepare an official response to the “various unfounded claims.”
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