Harmony, once pitched as a faster rival to Ethereum, has proposed shutting down its own blockchain and turning its ONE token into an ERC-20 asset on Ethereum, seven years after the network launched. The plan, announced Sunday, follows an August exploit severe enough that the team concluded patching the chain was no longer worth the effort.
How the migration would work
Under the proposal, Harmony would take a final snapshot of the network and airdrop new ERC-20 tokens to the same addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would cover wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchange balances. No claims process is required, and the project says total supply and emission rates stay unchanged through the transition.
Not everything can make the jump. Multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated. Harmony is urging users to exit all smart contracts before September 10, the same day validators may begin shutting down their nodes. Exchange listings would move to the new Ethereum version of the token.
The project says the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts will all be published for outside auditing. Anyone will be able to check the math behind the migration against the final chain state.
A $1.37 million pool for validators
Validators get three options: stop their nodes, continue as governors of the wound-down network, or join the next venture. A compensation pool of $1.372 million is set aside for validators who stop on time, keep their stakes and agree to serve as governors. Payments would run over four quarters, covering the gap between the final emission reward and the actual last block of the network.
The proposal is described as non-binding. Harmony has not specified when the final block would be produced or whether the plan will go through its own governance process, which normally requires 51% of total stake-weight participation and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction period and a 14-day vote. Skipping that process would be its own controversy, since validators are the people being asked to give up a network they help run.
An exploit set this in motion
The endgame follows weeks of damage control. On August 12, Harmony said it was considering a rollback after reports that an attacker had minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, roughly 26% of total supply. An outside account claimed about 2.8 billion of the forged tokens reached exchanges, though Harmony never confirmed those figures at the time.
Five days later the project announced it would revert the blockchain to an August 11 checkpoint, discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Investigators said they traced nearly all of the forged tokens to specific wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement to contain the fallout.
That rollback alone would have been one of the larger chain reorganizations in recent memory. Instead of rebuilding trust in the repaired network, the team has decided to end it. Developers cited security pressure from state actors and AI agents as part of the reason the burden no longer looked manageable for a mid-sized chain.
From blockchain to AI video
The pivot target is an AI video business the team calls a remix economy, with former validators taking roles as governors, operators or affiliates. Harmony has not explained how the new business would create value for ONE holders, and that question is the loudest open issue in the plan. The token keeps its name and supply, but the connection to whatever the company builds next is thin on detail.
No timeline for the shutdown has been given. ONE traded near $0.00073 after the announcement, down more than 3%, a modest move for a proposal that would end an independent blockchain.
Harmony launched in 2019 promising high throughput and Ethereum compatibility. It raised venture funding during the 2021 bull market and, like many layer-1 projects of that vintage, never recovered its early momentum after the 2022 bear market and a previous bridge exploit. Ending the chain and migrating to Ethereum is, in effect, an admission that standing alone had stopped making sense.
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