Harmony, the Ethereum-compatible layer-1 network that launched in 2019, proposed on Sunday shutting down its blockchain entirely and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum, ending a seven-year run marked by two major security failures. The team said threats from state actors and AI agents had grown too large for the network to keep operating on its own.
The plan calls for a final network snapshot, new ERC-20 ONE tokens issued on Ethereum, and migrated exchange listings. Holders would not need to claim anything: balances recorded at the final block would be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, with total supply and emission rates unchanged.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony wrote in its X announcement, saying the community had withstood multiple attacks since mainnet launch but that it was now time to fully shut down the network.
What migrates and what does not
The snapshot would cover personal wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and holdings on centralized exchanges. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would go to individual governor vaults.
Multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated automatically. Harmony urged users to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026, the day validators may begin shutting down their nodes.
A compensation pool of $1.372 million, distributed over four quarters, is set aside for validators that stop on time, retain their stakes, sign the relevant agreements and agree to serve as “governors” in Harmony’s next venture. Validators would also have the option to simply stop their nodes or join the new project outright.
The proposal is explicitly non-binding. Harmony did not say when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would go through the network’s validator-led governance process, which requires 51% of total stake weight to participate and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction and 14-day vote.
An exploit forced the endgame
The announcement lands less than four weeks after an exploit that turned repair into retreat. On August 12, Harmony confirmed that an attacker had abused a flaw in its cross-shard receipt verification system, which let valid receipts be processed multiple times and allowed new ONE to be minted without a matching debit elsewhere.
Early reports put the forged supply at about 4 billion tokens, roughly 26% of total supply, with around 2.8 billion claimed to have reached exchanges. A later reconstruction by Harmony found the attacker minted more than 3 trillion ONE across six rounds of unauthorized issuance. The team also flagged a bug in its pre-staking quorum-checking system.
On August 17, Harmony said it would roll the chain back to an August 11 checkpoint, discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Investigators traced nearly all the forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries, and the team said it was working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement. At the time, migrating the token to another chain was already listed as an option.
A history of security failures
The August exploit was not the first blow. In June 2022, the Horizon cross-chain bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in ether and stablecoins after its multisig wallet was compromised. The FBI later attributed the attack to Lazarus Group and APT38, hacking units linked to North Korea.
Harmony said it plans to replace its blockchain business with a “remix economy” centered on AI video creators, where creators publish prompts and content assets, users remix them and AI agents expand them into videos. New ONE issuance would support that initiative, pending community feedback.
Markets reacted mildly: ONE fell 3.86% in 24 hours to about $0.00073, according to The Block’s price page. The token has traded at a fraction of a cent since the 2022 bridge hack, so the migration plan mostly matters for the roughly 12.9 billion tokens still circulating and the exchanges that list them.
Whether the community accepts the sunset remains open. The proposal leaves the governance question unanswered, and some validators may prefer to keep the chain running. But after a rollback that erased more than 109,000 transactions and a history that includes a $100 million bridge theft, the direction of travel is clear: Harmony is winding down as a blockchain and betting its future on AI video instead.
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