The ongoing conflict between Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh and the Ocean Protocol Foundation took a new turn as the CEO announced a bounty for information regarding an alleged misappropriation of tokens worth millions.
In a post on X, Sheikh offered a $250,000 reward for details about the signatories of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their relationship with the Ocean Protocol Foundation.
A multisignature wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that mandates multiple signatures to authorize and process transactions.
Sheikh’s $250,000 bounty follows claims that a team wallet connected to Ocean Protocol misappropriated approximately 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens, valued at around $80 million at the time.
This alleged misappropriation took place during the 2024 merger of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, integrating Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNet into a unified token framework.
Sheikh stated that Ocean Protocol minted and moved millions of OCEAN tokens prior to the merger, converting them into FET tokens and transferring them to centralized exchanges without proper disclosures.
The dispute escalated into legal threats last week after Sheikh pledged to finance class-action lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions and urged Binance, GSR, and ExaGroup to conduct investigations.
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The Binance exchange announced that it would stop supporting OCEAN token deposits, although it did not cite the ongoing dispute as a reason for this decision.
This escalating conflict has also impacted the FET token’s price, which dropped by 9% over the past 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
Although Ocean Protocol has denied the allegations, on-chain data indicates that a multisignature wallet linked to Ocean Protocol converted around 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, as suggested by blockchain data platform Bubblemaps.
“Despite the merger, the Ocean Protocol team retained a significant amount of $OCEAN in their wallets—purportedly for ‘community incentives’ and ‘data farming,’” they 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 involved the transfer of 160 million FET tokens to Binance and 109 million to GSR Markets.
Ocean Protocol exited the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance on October 9, without addressing the token transfers.
On Thursday, the protocol denied the allegations and stated it would prepare a formal response to the “various unfounded claims.”
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