Ongoing dispute between Download.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh and the Ocean Protocol Foundation made another U-turn as the CEO offered a reward for additional information related to the alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars worth of tokens.
Sheikh, in X post on Tuesday offered a $250,000 reward for additional information about the signatories of OceanDAO’s multi-signature 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 transactions.
The $250,000 bounty offer comes days after the CEO alleged that the team’s Ocean Protocol-affiliated wallet misappropriated approximately 286 million Fetch.ai tokens (FET) worth approximately $80 million at press time.
The misappropriation occurred during the 2024 merger of the Alliance for Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Download.aiOcean Protocol and SingularityNet into a common token structure.
Sheikh alleged that Ocean Protocol minted and transferred millions of OCEAN tokens prior to the merger and converted them to FET tokens prior to transfer to centralized exchanges without the necessary disclosures.
Last week, after Sheikh’s defeat, the dispute turned into legal threats he promised to fund class actions in three or more jurisdictions and called on Binance, GSR and ExaGroup to investigate the matter.
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Binance Exchange announced stopped handling OCEAN token deposits on Thursday, but did not cite the dispute as the reason for its decision.
The escalating dispute also affected the price of the FET token, which fell by 9% in the last 24 hours and was at $0.25 at 20:47 UTC, according to Cointelegraph data.
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Ocean Protocol transferred $120 million of FET tokens to Binance and OTC providers: Bubblemaps
While Ocean Protocol has denied the allegations, onchain data points to a multi-signal wallet associated with Ocean Protocol that converts approximately 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, according to blockchain data platform Bubblemaps.
“Despite the merger, the Ocean Protocol team kept a large amount of OCEAN in their wallets – ostensibly for ‘social incentives’ and ‘data farming,'” he wrote in Tuesday’s issue of X postadding:
“In total, an estimated 270 million $FET tokens were sent to Binance or an OTC provider […] Total value: ~$120 million.
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 October 9, without mentioning any token transfers.
Report on Thursday negative allegations and said it would prepare a formal response to “various unfounded claims”.
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