Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh has started a major dispute with the Ocean Protocol Foundation, both online and in court. He accuses them of mishandling merger tokens from the ASI project and says he will personally fund lawsuits to uncover what happened to $84 million in tokens.
The conflict comes from the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, a 2024 plan to combine Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNET under one shared token.
Mr. Sheikh claimed on Wednesday that Ocean Protocol secretly created and moved $719 million OCEAN tokens in 2023. He said $661 million of these tokens were later converted into the disputed FET tokens in July 2025, and large amounts were moved to trading firms without public notice. Sheikh stated that if a single project did this, it would be called a “rug pull.”
The public dispute soon drew reactions from major exchanges. Binance announced it will stop accepting deposits of Ocean Protocol’s OCEAN tokens on the main ERC-20 network starting Monday, October 20. While Binance did not directly cite the feud, the timing suggests the exchange may be reviewing the situation to manage its own risk.
Mr. Sheikh said on X that Binance’s action shows the exchange is “listening” to his call to examine Ocean Protocol’s token movements.
Looking ahead, Sheikh has promised to fund class-action lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions. He also called on all FET token holders to help gather evidence against Ocean Protocol.
In response, Ocean Protocol denied all accusations, describing them as “unfounded claims and harmful rumors.” The company said its funds remain safe and operations continue as usual.
Ocean Protocol added that the issue is already under formal judicial review and claimed they offered to disclose the judge’s findings, an offer Sheikh reportedly declined.
The crypto community now watches closely, as this case could test how far transparency and accountability truly go in token mergers.
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