Ocean Protocol Forks to Retrieve Tokens Stolen From KuCoin Exchange
On Sunday, Ocean Protocol conducted a hard fork from its old token address to prevent the KuCoin exchange hacker from continued unloading of stolen OCEAN tokens on decentralized exchange Uniswap.
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Artificial intelligence and data service Ocean Protocol has suspended its old contract on the Ethereum blockchain and hard-forked its project, following the $150 million KuCoin hack.
On Sunday at 22:00 UTC, Ocean Protocol announced it had migrated from its old token address to a new one to thwart the KuCoin hacker's attempts to offload 21 million OCEAN tokens worth some $8.6 million. According to a Sept. 27 blog post from the Ocean Protocol team:
Moving contract addresses has effectively blacklisted the hacker’s stash of OCEAN tokens. But it also raises questions of the project's true immutability if the protocol can be effectively hard-forked in one weekend.
Prior to the hard fork, the hacker offloaded some 330,000 OCEAN tokens worth $120,000, according to The Block's head of research, Larry Cermak. Ocean Protocol has a liquid supply of 587,622,921 OCEAN tokens with a maximum supply of 1.4 billion OCEAN.
KuCoin hack
Singapore-based KuCoin was hacked Friday beginning at 19:05 UTC. The hacker gained access to the platform’s hot wallet keys, said KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu in a weekend livestream.
Lyu said the platform intends to cover for hacked losses with insurance funds.
The Ocean Protocol team did not return questions for comment by press time.