TL;DR
- Harmony proposed shutting down its layer-1 blockchain and migrating the ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20, seven years after its mainnet launch.
- An exploit in August allowed the minting of nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, equivalent to 26% of the supply, which accelerated the decision.
- Validators will receive a $1.37 million fund as compensation if they stop their nodes before September 10 and take on governance roles.
Harmony, the Ethereum-compatible layer-1 network, proposed the permanent shutdown of its blockchain and the migration of its native token ONE to Ethereum under the ERC-20 standard, seven years after the launch of its mainnet in 2019.
The proposal, published in non-binding terms, does not specify the exact date of the final block nor confirm whether the process will be submitted to the network’s governance mechanism, which requires the participation of 51% of the total staked weight and the support of 66.7% of votes following a seven-day introduction period and a fourteen-day voting period.
— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) September 6, 2026
The Shutdown of Harmony: The August Exploit
The proposal was submitted less than four weeks after an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the network’s cross-shard transaction verification system. On August 11, the attacker minted more than three trillion unauthorized ONE tokens across six transactions, equivalent to approximately 26% of the total supply.
Given the potential scope of the exploit, Harmony executed a chain rollback to a checkpoint prior to the attack, permanently eliminating 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. It was not the first serious blow the network had suffered: in June 2022, the Horizon bridge had been drained and nearly $100 million was lost in an attack that the FBI later attributed to the North Korean group Lazarus Group.
Under the proposed scheme, Harmony will take a final snapshot of all ONE balances, which will include wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges. The new ERC-20 tokens will be distributed automatically to the same addresses on Ethereum, with no need for users to submit claims. However, the network warned that multisig safes, liquidity pools and onchain applications will not be migratable, and urged users to withdraw their funds from all smart contracts before September 10.
The Future of ONE: From Blockchain to AI Video Economy
Harmony validators will be able to begin stopping their nodes from 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time on September 10. Those who do so within the deadline, maintain their stake and agree to take on governance roles in the new venture will receive compensation from the $1.372 million fund reserved for that purpose.
Future ONE emissions, previously intended to reward network security, will shift to funding what Harmony calls the “Remix Economy for AI Video”, a subscription service oriented toward audiovisual content generation through artificial intelligence. The project justified the decision by stating that “threats from state actors and AI agents are too great” to sustain the network’s independent operation.
