Ocean Protocol chooses to Hard Fork over KuCoin Hack

On Friday 25th, the cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin was hacked, resulting in over $203 million in coins being stolen. The bulk of the stolen funds appeared to be in Altcoins, as a result, many crypto projects decided to start freezing their tokens. Ocean Protocol seemed to take the most drastic action, implementing a hard fork to render all of the stolen OCEAN worthless.

Why did Ocean Protocol hard fork?

Roughly $8.6 million worth of OCEAN tokens were stolen from the KuCoin exchange. Meaning that 21 million OCEAN could be dumped on the market by the hacker. The team immediately used a pause function in the token’s smart contract code to stop any transfers. They then chose to issue a hard fork and deploy a new token entirely. However, the swift actions seem to be creating a rift in the community with many asking why this function exists in the first place.

Not a decentralized marketplace… If we break it down, the team has effectively showcased that Ocean Protocol can be paused at any time. It is worrying that a project described as a decentralized data marketplace has shown they may censor their protocol at any time.

• Not only Ocean has taken this path of freezing tokens. Orion, Covesting, SilentNotary, Velo Labs, and Kardia Chain all made similar moves to stop the hacker from dumping stolen funds.

So what is the token for… Ocean Protocol may have to be ready to answer some hard questions during the next community AMA. Because, it appears pausing the token and then issuing a hard fork, strangely, did not disturb the data marketplace. Which begs questions around what the data marketplace runs on and how it interacts with the token.