The feud between Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol Foundation may be coming to an end as both sides look to reach a middle ground without escalating to a full-blown legal battle.
On Thursday, Fetch.ai said it would drop all pending legal claims against the Ocean Protocol Foundation if the latter returned 286 million Fetch.ai (FET) tokens that were allegedly sold during their merger.
“They are expecting a legal motion from us for the return of the tokens,” Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Shaikh said during Thursday’s X Space Show.
“You can receive my letter tomorrow. The offer is simple: return the tokens to my community. I will drop every legal claim.”
Sheikh also offered to cover the legal costs of the pending contract, which would allow the recovery of the token.
Connected: $19B market crash paves way for Bitcoin to surge to $200K: Standard Chartered
If the proposal is officially put to paper, Ocean Protocol will agree to return the tokens, said Geostaking, the FET-based validator node of the protocol that helped broker the deal.
The formal proposal could be put on paper as soon as Friday, Sheikh said during the X Space Show.
This settlement will enable both parties to resolve the misunderstanding without the need for lengthy litigation, which could be damaging to the reputation and finances of both parties.
The latest offer comes days after Sheikh offered a $250,000 reward for more information about signers of OceanDAO’s multisignature wallet and their connections to the Ocean Protocol Foundation.
Multisignature or multisig wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that requires multiple signatures to execute and process a transaction.
Connected: SpaceX invests $257 million in Bitcoin, raising questions again about its crypto play
Ocean Protocol accused of $120 million token dump
Despite Ocean Protocol denying allegations of misappropriation, blockchain data indicates that multisignature wallets associated with Ocean Protocol converted approximately 661 million Ocean tokens into 286 million FET coins, worth approximately $120 million at the time, according to blockchain data platform BubbleMaps.
Of this, 160 million FET tokens were transferred to Binance and 109 million were transferred to GSR Markets.
Ocean Protocol withdrew from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance on October 9, with no mention of token transfers.
Since the announcement of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) in March 2024, the FET token has fallen by more than 93%, from a peak of $3.22 to around $0.26 at the time of writing.
Nevertheless, according to Ocean Protocol founder Bruce Pon, Ocean Protocol leaving ASI did not cause the price to decline. He wrote in Thursday’s blog response:
,[The 93% drop] Due to widespread market sentiment and volatility, SingularityNet and Fetch drained liquidity from the entire community by selling over $500 million worth of $FET tokens, a reckless TRNR deal that failed to predict a decline of more than 45% in the crypto. […],
“Ocean has decided that it can no longer in good conscience be a part of the ASI alliance,” the founder said, promising to publish a “claim-by-claim rebuttal” to all recent allegations.
magazine: ‘Accidental jailbreak’ and ChatGPT linked to murder, suicide: AI Eye
