#Foundation Senior Researcher Danny O'Brien Says the Group Has Hired a Lawyer and Is Trying to Determine If Police Hold Missing Funds The Filecoin Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the development of Web3 storage protocol Filecoin, "has a lawyer in China" and is investigating reports of the detention of Filecoin Liquid Staking (ST fil) team members, according to an April 13 social media post by Foundation Senior Researcher Danny O'Brien.
In early April, after several unplanned upgrades to a developer wallet, the withdrawal function from the STFIL protocol stopped transferring tokens worth $23 million to addresses whose owners were unknown. On April 8, the STFIL team announced that core technical members were detained by local police in China, and that the mysterious upgrades and transfers occurred during these detentions. This announcement left many STFIL users wondering how they could recover their funds.
In the post, O'Brien stated that "FF has a lawyer in China who has been investigating the incident," adding that the Foundation "highly believes" that STFIL team members have been detained by the police. The Foundation has not yet been able to confirm whether the police have the funds, but they expect to know this information in "more than a week." The foundation plans to allow its lawyers to represent all staking providers and renters in any court action related to the incident. O'Brien promised that he would share more information once the details of the plan are finalized. He also asked staking providers who lost funds to provide contact information through a Google Doc or Slack channel set up for this purpose.
Danny O'Brien, senior researcher at the Filecoin Foundation.Filecoin is a decentralized storage protocol that allows PC owners to rent out their hard drive space to users with data storage needs. It requires storage providers to provide FIL tokens as collateral to guarantee that they store data in accordance with the agreement.
