Harmony has proposed shutting down its own layer-1 blockchain after seven years and turning its ONE token into an ERC-20 asset on Ethereum, a move that would end the network’s run as an independent chain. The proposal, published on Sunday, is non-binding and sets no date for the final block, but it marks a turn from repairing the network after August’s exploit to winding it down altogether.
The plan calls for a final network snapshot, the issuance of new ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum and the migration of exchange listings. All ONE balances would be recorded at the network’s final block, with replacement tokens airdropped to the same addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would cover wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchange holdings, and holders would not need to file any claim.
What cannot move
Not everything makes the trip. Harmony said multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, and it urged users to exit all smart contracts before September 10. Validators could begin shutting down their nodes that day. A pool of $1.372 million has been set aside to compensate validators who stop on time, retain their stakes and agree to serve as governors in the new structure.
Validators were offered three options: stop their nodes, continue as governors, or join Harmony’s new AI-video initiative, which the project now frames as its main growth bet. Under that pivot, the network that launched in 2019 would leave behind its own infrastructure, and the project’s future would rest on AI-generated video rather than layer-1 technology.
| Validator option | What it means |
|---|---|
| Stop nodes | Shut down on time, keep staked funds, claim from the $1.372 million pool |
| Become governor | Retain a role in overseeing the migrated token after the chain closes |
| Join AI-video initiative | Move to Harmony’s new project focus outside the blockchain |
How the vote would work
Passage requires participation from 51 percent of total stake weight and support from 66.7 percent of those who take part. The process runs through a seven-day introduction period followed by a 14-day vote. Harmony did not say whether the shutdown would go through the network’s validator-led governance process at all, and it gave no date for the final block, which leaves token holders and validators working from an incomplete picture.
The exploit that started this
The proposal lands less than four weeks after an exploit forced the network into crisis mode. On August 12, Harmony said it was considering a rollback after reports that an attacker had minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, an amount equal to about 26 percent of total supply. An outside account claimed that about 2.8 billion of the forged tokens had reached exchanges, though Harmony had not confirmed those figures at the time.
The plan to discard more than 109,000 transactions in a rollback drew criticism on its own. Now the project has moved past repairing the ledger toward ending it. Investigators said they had traced nearly all the forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement.
Harmony described the proposal as non-binding and did not specify when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would be submitted to the network’s validator-led governance process.
A quiet exit for a once-prominent chain
Harmony launched its mainnet in 2019 with a sharding design that promised high throughput and low fees. It raised funding during the 2021 bull market and pushed into ecosystem grants, but activity never returned to those levels, and the token has traded far below its highs for years. The exploit appears to have settled an argument the project was already losing with itself: whether running an independent layer-1 was worth the cost.
Migrating to Ethereum removes the burden of maintaining validators, bridges and a native chain, and it puts ONE inside an ecosystem with deeper liquidity and tooling. It also hands Ethereum another retired competitor, a pattern that has repeated across smaller layer-1 networks in recent years.
The open questions are practical. Without a shutdown date, exchanges cannot schedule delistings of the native token, and applications that cannot migrate face a hard cutoff they cannot plan around. Harmony’s proposal says the right things about snapshots and airdrops, but the missing timeline is the part that matters most to anyone still holding assets on the chain.
ONE holders have watched the token lose most of its value long before this proposal. The coin traded near $0.40 at its peak in 2021 and has since fallen into the low single cents, a decline that tracks the broader retreat of 2021-era layer-1 projects. The exploit in August accelerated the slide, and the shutdown proposal now formalizes what the price had been signaling for months: the market no longer priced Harmony as a going concern.
The move also closes a chapter that began with high expectations. Harmony raised a $300 million treasury deployment program in 2022 aimed at decentralized finance growth, a bet that never produced the activity the project hoped for. Through 2023 and 2024 the team shifted toward artificial intelligence work, and the AI-video initiative mentioned in the proposal is the continuation of that drift. In effect, the blockchain was already secondary to the company. The proposal makes it official.
Other networks have taken similar exits. Several 2017-era projects have either halted quietly or migrated their tokens to larger chains rather than maintain infrastructure nobody used. The economics are blunt: a layer-1 needs enough transaction fees and staking demand to justify validator costs, and when those disappear, running the chain becomes a subsidy with no end date. Ethereum, by contrast, carries those costs across an ecosystem with thousands of applications, so hosting a retired token costs its project almost nothing.
For holders, the immediate checklist is short. Anyone with ONE in a self-custody wallet needs to do nothing, since the airdrop lands at the same addresses. Anyone with funds in multisig safes, liquidity pools or smart contracts on Harmony must withdraw before the September 10 deadline, because those positions cannot be converted. Exchange holders are in the middle: the migration of listings depends on each exchange adopting the ERC-20 token, and Harmony has not published which venues have signed on. Until it does, tokens sitting on an exchange that opts out are the biggest unresolved risk in the plan.