A phishing email. A compromised laptop. And then $36 million gone, along with most of a project’s credibility. That is the short version of what happened to Humanity Protocol in June 2026, and the long version involves a pivot that nobody saw coming.
Humanity Protocol founder Terence Kwok confirmed the project is shifting its focus toward enterprise AI, a significant departure from its original mission as a decentralized identity platform built around Proof of Humanity. Recovery odds for the stolen funds are, in his own framing, low.
What actually happened
On June 9, 2026, attackers gained access to a developer’s private keys after a phishing email linked to Bithumb compromised a laptop on the team. That single point of failure cascaded fast.
The hackers used those keys to access the project’s Gnosis Safe multisig wallets. In English: multisig wallets are supposed to require multiple approvals before any funds move, making them harder to drain than a standard wallet. One compromised device apparently made that protection meaningless.
