Ocean Protocol Forks To Retrieve 21 Million OCEAN Stolen From KuCoin

On September 26, hackers breached KuCoin’s hot wallets and stole nearly $150 million worth of digital assets, $8.6 million of which were OCEAN tokens (over 21 million OCEAN). Currently, the hackers are attempting to liquidate the illicitly-acquired assets. In response, the Ocean Protocol team announced the initiation of a hard fork of the Ocean Token contract, which aims to reverse the effects of the hack on the Ocean ecosystem.

The new contract was instantiated at 16:00 GMT on September 27, reflecting the balances of OCEAN as of block height 10,943,665 on the Ethereum mainnet. The idea behind the new smart contract is to allocate the stolen tokens to an address that will be held in a Singapore trust for clients affected by the theft. In the initial post, the organization urged the community to take part in the fork as they claimed to have no power to compel exchanges, wallets, and informational services to recognize the new contract address.

“The OCEAN contract contained a pause function for unforeseen emergencies like this one. We will post further updates after the hard fork is completed. We thank the community for your overwhelming support,” the company said.

In a follow-up post on September 28, the Ocean Protocol Foundation released an update on the situation, saying that all previous token balances were now reflected in the new Ocean token contract. As of now, users who want to see and use their OCEAN tokens need to first take “some actions” in order to do so.

According to the post, users interested in only holding their tokens do not need to do anything but wait for wallet providers to update. The organization claimed that, currently, OCEAN may appear twice in some wallets, such as Coinbase. On the other hand, in other wallets such as Ledger Live, the new OCEAN tokens might not be shown at all.

For people that want to transact with their cryptocurrency, though, there are tools that should be used atop of their wallets. With MEW or MetaMask, clients should be able to add the new OCEAN as a custom token with the new contract address. Moreover, the company reported that people who left their tokens on major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bittrex Global, Gate.io, Poloniex, and others, will be able to make deposits and withdrawals in a matter of days, as the foundation is currently coordinating the update of the contract address.