The ongoing dispute between Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh and Ocean Protocol Foundation has taken another turn, as the CEO announced a bounty for more details regarding an alleged misappropriation of tokens valued in the millions.
In a post on X Tuesday, Sheikh offered a reward of $250,000 for information about the signatories of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their ties to the Ocean Protocol Foundation.
A multisignature or multisig wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet requiring multiple signatures to carry out and process a transaction.
This $250,000 bounty was announced shortly after Sheikh alleged that a team wallet associated with Ocean Protocol misappropriated approximately 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens, equating to about $80 million at the time of writing.
The alleged misappropriation occurred during the 2024 merger of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, which integrated Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNet into a unified token framework.
Sheikh claimed that Ocean Protocol minted and transferred vast amounts of OCEAN tokens before the merger and exchanged them for FET tokens, subsequently moving them to centralized exchanges without proper disclosures.
The conflict escalated into legal threats last week after Sheikh promised to finance class-action lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions and urged Binance, GSR, and ExaGroup to investigate.
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On Thursday, Binance exchange announced it would cease support for OCEAN token deposits, although the dispute was not cited as the reason for this decision.
The intensifying conflict has also impacted the price of the FET token, which dropped 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 has denied the accusations, onchain data reveals that an Ocean Protocol-associated multisignature wallet converted around 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, according to blockchain data platform Bubblemaps.
“Despite the merger, the Ocean Protocol team retained a significant amount of $OCEAN in their wallets – supposedly for ‘community incentives’ and ‘data farming,’” noted a post on X Tuesday, adding:
“In total, around 270M $FET tokens were sent to Binance or an OTC provider […] Total value: ~$120M.”
This included 160 million FET tokens sent to Binance and 109 million transferred to GSR Markets.
On October 9, Ocean Protocol withdrew from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, with no reference to the token transfers.
On Thursday, the protocol rejected the claims and stated it would prepare a formal response to the “various unfounded allegations.”
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