Artificial intelligence and data service Ocean Protocol has its old contract on the Ethereum blockchain and hard-forked its project, following the $150 million .
On Sunday at 22:00 UTC, Ocean Protocol announced it had migrated from its 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 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, to The Block 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.
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.
OCEAN’s price fell as much as 8% from $0.399 per token to $0.365 as the hacker sold the stolen tokens in tranches of 10,000 coins, according to . He or she then moved onto other holdings including COMP, SNX and LINK after the contract was paused.
The hacker stolen ERC-20 tokens for ether (), the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain. These swaps have largely been facilitated by Uniswap, a popular decentralized exchange (DEX) due to a novel liquidity model that reduces price slippage.
The Ocean Protocol team did not return questions for comment by press time.
