After a $36M Hack, Humanity Protocol's Founder Bets the Company on Enterprise AI
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Overview
Humanity Protocol built its business on palm-scan biometrics and "proof of personhood" credentials, a Worldcoin-style bet that verifying humans (versus bots and AI agents) would become critical infrastructure. That thesis got tested in the worst way in June 2026, when attackers compromised a developer's laptop via a phishing email and made off with private keys tied to a Humanity Foundation member, draining roughly $36 million from the project's treasury. The H token collapsed as much as 89% within a day.
Speaking to The Block's Gareth Jenkinson on July 2, 2026, Terence Kwok, CEO and Founder of Humanity Protocol, who previously founded hospitality-tech unicorn Tink Labs, was blunt about recovery prospects:
"I think the chance for actual fund recovery is pretty low."
He drew the comparison directly to Bybit's struggle to recover its own, far larger $1.4 billion ether theft from the previous year: a case where, more than a year later, most of the stolen funds remain unrecovered.
Rather than framing the hack as a one-off crisis, Kwok described it as an accelerant for a strategic shift that was already underway:
"I think, in line with the hack, we're probably moving forward repositioning ourselves less as a blockchain company or less as an identity or decentralized IT project."
The new direction: enterprise AI. Terence Kwok argues that identity verification, Humanity Protocol's original core product, becomes more valuable, not less, as AI agents proliferate:
"There's a lot more products and services that we're going to be launching tied to the enterprise AI space. What we're actually realizing is that in this current world of AI, it's only going to be more important."
The team has issued a new token and airdropped it to exchanges as part of a compensation process being run through the Humanity Foundation. Kwok says he's in contact with law enforcement across Hong Kong, the U.S., and other jurisdictions, but the operational focus has shifted from fund recovery to rebuilding, including the MasterCard partnership on proof-of-assets credentialing that predates the hack.
The pivot puts Humanity Protocol in a crowded lane: enterprise "identity for AI agents" is becoming a live category as verification-of-humanness use cases (KYC for agentic finance, credential checks for AI-driven hiring and lending) get pulled forward by the same AI boom that's pressuring every other infra thesis to reposition around it.