Humanity Protocol pivots to enterprise AI after $36 million hack

Humanity Protocol has confirmed it is repositioning toward enterprise artificial intelligence products after a $36 million exploit accelerated an internal strategic overhaul that had already been under discussion for months.

During a recent interview, Humanity Protocol founder Terence Kwok said the company had been reconsidering its long-term direction for the past six to nine months and that the June security breach pushed those plans forward sooner than expected.

Enterprise AI takes priority after hack

Rather than continuing to present itself primarily as a blockchain identity platform, Kwok said Humanity Protocol will increasingly focus on building products and services for enterprise AI customers. He explained that digital identity remains an important part of the company’s work because AI systems will require stronger methods of verifying people and credentials.

Kwok said the team has already been testing products designed for AI companies and plans to introduce additional enterprise-focused offerings. Humanity Protocol previously developed a proof-of-personhood blockchain supporting credentials for employment, assets, and credit scoring, including work with Mastercard on proof-of-assets applications. 

According to Kwok, the platform has registered around 10 million users, with a couple of million completing their credentials.

The strategic change follows one of the project’s biggest setbacks. Humanity Protocol lost roughly $36 million after attackers gained access to critical private keys, triggering a sharp collapse in the H token and forcing the project into recovery mode.

Recovery efforts continue as token migration moves ahead

Discussing the aftermath of the attack, Kwok said the chances of recovering the stolen funds are “pretty low,” adding that the team’s attention has instead turned to rebuilding the ecosystem. He compared the situation with Bybit’s unsuccessful efforts to recover approximately $1.4 billion worth of ether stolen in a separate attack last year.

As part of the recovery process, Humanity Protocol has issued a replacement token and distributed it to a range of addresses, including major cryptocurrency exchanges. Kwok said discussions are continuing around snapshot dates, suspended deposits and withdrawals, liquidity pools and custodian arrangements, while investigators work to identify every transaction that took place after the breach before completing compensation claims.

Law enforcement agencies in multiple jurisdictions, beginning with Hong Kong alongside authorities in the United States, have also been contacted as investigations continue, according to Kwok.

Earlier findings released by Humanity Protocol and security firm Quantstamp attributed the exploit to compromised private keys stored on a developer device rather than vulnerabilities in the project’s smart contracts. 

The June investigation concluded that attackers obtained control of production systems after malware infected a developer machine containing backups of several critical keys, allowing them to authorize legitimate-looking transactions that drained about 141 million H tokens from the Ethereum bridge before additional tokens were minted on BNB Smart Chain. Humanity Protocol and Quantstamp said the attack bore characteristics associated with North Korea-linked threat actors.

The breach wiped out most of the H token’s value within hours, with on-chain analysts estimating losses of more than $32 million at the time and the token falling roughly 89% as the attacker minted and sold tokens across multiple chains. Kwok said monitoring systems quickly detected unusual token movements after the compromise, although determining the full extent of the incident required several days of forensic analysis across the project’s infrastructure.