Harmony, a sharded layer-1 blockchain that launched in 2019, has proposed shutting down its network and converting its ONE token into an ERC-20 asset on Ethereum, ending seven years as an independent chain. The plan, posted by the project on September 6, is non-binding and does not yet set a date for the final block, but validators can begin powering down their nodes from September 10.
The team cited security as the reason. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony wrote on X. Defending a small proof-of-stake network against increasingly capable attackers had become too costly to continue, the project said, adding that the community had been resilient through attacks and changes since mainnet launch but that it was time to sunset the network.
How the migration would work
Under the proposal, Harmony would take a snapshot of all ONE balances at the network’s final block and airdrop matching ERC-20 tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. Holders would not need to claim anything. The snapshot covers wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and tokens held on centralized exchanges, and exchange listings would move across with it.
Not everything makes the trip. Multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, and the team urged users to exit all smart contracts before September 10. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be routed to individual governor vaults instead. Total supply and the emission rate stay unchanged, but newly issued tokens would fund the project’s next act rather than chain security.
| Date | Step |
|---|---|
| Sept 6, 2026 | Sunset proposal published, described as non-binding |
| Sept 10, 2026 | Users must exit all smart contracts; validators may begin shutting down nodes |
| Final block | Snapshot of wallets, staking, rewards and exchange balances |
| After snapshot | ERC-20 ONE airdropped to the same addresses on Ethereum, no claim needed |
Validators who stop on time, keep their stakes and sign on as governors for the new venture share a $1.372 million compensation pool, paid out over four quarters. The payment covers the difference in emission rewards between node shutdown and the network’s final block.
Transparency is part of the pitch. Harmony says it will publish the Ethereum token contract, the governor vault contract, the snapshot calculations and the airdrop scripts for public audit before anything executes. That commitment matters because the migration touches every wallet on the network, and a botched airdrop would strand balances with no chain left to fall back on.
An exploit set the stage
The shutdown proposal arrived less than four weeks after an exploit nearly broke the chain. On August 11, an attacker used a flaw in how Harmony verified transactions moving between its shards to mint trillions of unauthorized ONE across six transactions, an amount equal to a large share of total supply. Harmony responded with a rollback to an August 11 checkpoint, permanently discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, a controversial step for any blockchain.
Investigators traced nearly all of the forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and worked with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement on recovery. But the damage to confidence was done. Weeks of rollback debate and cleanup made the case for repairing the network hard to sustain, and the proposal marks a shift from fixing the chain to ending it.
The exploit was not the first blow. In June 2022, the Horizon bridge hack drained close to $100 million from the network, a loss it never fully recovered from. Two major security failures in four years, on a chain whose economics depended on validator participation and developer goodwill, left little room for a third act as an independent network.
ONE’s own history adds to the sense of a closing chapter. The token peaked near $0.38 in October 2021, when the network held more than $1 billion in user deposits and the game DeFi Kingdoms alone accounted for $747 million of it. Prices then fell as much as 99 percent from that high. In recent trading, ONE changed hands near $0.00073, down close to 4 percent over 24 hours.
From blockchain to AI video
The replacement business is an AI video venture Harmony calls a remix economy. Creators would publish prompts and other materials that users and AI agents can reuse to generate new video clips, on a subscription priced at $10 a month. Validators become governors, operators run video generation and distribution infrastructure, and the project plans to subsidize GPU hardware in the first year. Harmony says operators who meet staking and uptime requirements could generate up to $1 million in combined first-year revenue, and promoters would earn a 30 percent commission on referred subscriptions.
Whether that business justifies keeping a token attached at all is the question critics have raised. ONE was originally issued to reward validators for securing the blockchain. If the chain disappears, future token issuance instead funds the video venture, which turns the asset into something closer to a pre-sale for an unrelated startup. Holders have no vote recorded yet on that pivot.
Harmony is not alone in calling time on its own chain. On September 21, ZetaChain tokenholders approved shutting down their layer 1 and migrating ZETA to Solana with 99.4 percent support. In August, BounceBit retired its standalone chain after an authorization flaw was exploited and moved its token to BNB Smart Chain at a 1:1 ratio. The pattern suggests that for smaller networks, running independent infrastructure has become a cost with no clear payback, and migrating the token to a larger chain is cheaper than defending one.
Whether Harmony’s plan clears its own governance process remains open. The project has not said whether the shutdown goes to a validator vote, where passage would require 51 percent of total stake weight to participate and 66.7 percent support after a seven-day introduction and a 14-day voting period. ZetaChain, by contrast, put its shutdown to a formal tokenholder vote and got a decisive answer. Harmony’s decision to keep its own process undefined leaves the door open to challenge from validators and delegators who stand to lose emission income.