Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh has escalated a dispute with the Ocean Protocol Foundation by offering a $250,000 bounty for information regarding the alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars worth of tokens.
Sheikh announced the bounty in an X post on Tuesday, seeking details about the signatories of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their connections to the Ocean Protocol Foundation. A multisignature or multisig wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that requires multiple signatures to authorize and process a transaction.
This bounty offer follows Sheikh's recent claims that a team wallet associated with Ocean Protocol misappropriated approximately 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens, valued at around $80 million at the time of reporting. This alleged misappropriation occurred during the 2024 merger of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, which consolidated Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNet into a unified token framework.
Sheikh asserted that Ocean Protocol minted and transferred millions of OCEAN tokens prior to the merger. These tokens were allegedly converted into FET and subsequently moved to centralized exchanges without proper disclosure.
The dispute intensified last week with legal threats, as Sheikh pledged to finance class-action lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions and urged exchanges like Binance, along with firms like GSR and ExaGroup, to investigate.
Binance announced on Thursday that it would cease support for OCEAN token deposits. However, the exchange did not attribute this decision to the ongoing dispute.
The escalating conflict has also impacted the FET token's price. According to Cointelegraph data, FET fell 9% in the past 24 hours and was trading at $0.25 as of 8:47 pm UTC.
Ocean Protocol Moved $120 Million in FET Tokens to Binance and OTC Providers, According to Bubblemaps
Despite Ocean Protocol's denial of the allegations, on-chain data from the blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps indicates that a multisignature wallet linked to Ocean Protocol converted approximately 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins.
Bubblemaps stated in an X post on Tuesday that Ocean Protocol retained a substantial amount of $OCEAN in their wallets post-merger, ostensibly for "community incentives" and "data farming." The platform further elaborated:
In total, an estimated 270M $FET tokens were sent to Binance or an OTC provider [...] Total value: ~$120M.
This transfer included 160 million FET tokens sent to Binance and 109 million tokens transferred to GSR Markets.
Ocean Protocol withdrew from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance on October 9, without any mention of these token transfers.
On Thursday, the protocol issued a denial of the allegations, stating it would prepare a formal response to the "various unfounded claims."