Harmony, the once high-profile Ethereum competitor, has proposed shutting down its own blockchain and moving the ONE token to Ethereum, saying the cost of defending the network has become too great. The team announced the plan on X on Sunday, writing that “the threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great” and that it was “time to fully sunset the Harmony network.”
The move is unusual. Failed blockchains normally fade away as users and developers drift off and nothing is left running, rather than announcing a planned closure with a migration path. Harmony wants to take a final snapshot of the chain and automatically issue matching ERC-20 tokens to holders on Ethereum, so that balances survive even after the network goes dark.
Why the network is closing
Harmony’s troubles stretch back years. In June 2022 the project’s Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million, an attack the FBI later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group and APT38. The theft landed shortly after Harmony had positioned itself as a fast, low-cost chain for DeFi during the 2021 bull market, and the network never recovered its standing.
More damage came recently. An August exploit prompted a controversial rollback that erased more than 109,000 transactions, a step that itself split the community because it rewrote chain history to undo the theft. Developers now argue that keeping the chain secure against increasingly capable attackers costs more than the network is worth, and that the burden will only grow.
What happens to ONE holders and validators
Under the nonbinding proposal, Harmony would publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public review before anything executes. Validators can begin shutting down their nodes from 7 a.m. Pacific on September 10, and the project has not yet set a date for the final snapshot.
The project has set aside $1.372 million, equal to the network’s total validator rewards during the year before the August exploit, to compensate validators that shut down on time, sign an agreement, keep their stake and take governance roles in what comes next. That is a modest sum spread across however many operators qualify, and it signals how small the network’s economics have become.
That next venture is the strangest part of the plan. ONE was originally issued in part to reward validators for securing the chain. If the chain disappears, future emissions would instead fund what Harmony calls the “Remix Economy for AI Video,” a subscription service where creators publish prompts and other assets that people and AI agents can reuse to generate video clips. In effect, the token’s inflation would bankroll a product that has nothing to do with the blockchain it came from.
ONE traded around $0.00073 on Monday, down almost 4% over 24 hours, a fraction of the levels the token reached during the 2021 bull market. The proposal had little visible price impact, which says something about how much trading interest remains in the asset.
A quiet end for a loud project
Harmony launched its mainnet in 2019 with high throughput sharding as its selling point and raised significant capital during the last cycle’s altcoin boom. The team acknowledged the community’s endurance in its announcement, noting it had been “resilient through attacks and changes” since launch.
Chains rarely retire on purpose. Most networks that lose momentum simply run on with a handful of validators until someone decides the server bill is no longer worth it. A planned shutdown, published contracts and a compensated validator wind-down are closer to how a company closes a division than how a blockchain usually dies.
The proposal is not yet binding, and holders will be watching the published contracts and airdrop scripts before any snapshot. But if it proceeds, Harmony would become one of the most prominent networks to voluntarily wind itself down, and one of the first to cite AI-driven attackers as a reason it can no longer afford to stay online.