Harmony is proposing to shut down its own blockchain and move the ONE token to Ethereum, a reversal of its position from three weeks ago. The plan, announced Sept. 6, comes after an Aug. 11 exploit that let attackers mint trillions of tokens, and it marks the end of a network that has been under pressure since a $100 million bridge hack in 2022.
The exploit that broke the chain
The Aug. 11 attack let bad actors reuse cross-shard receipts, creating tokens without corresponding debits. Harmony initially reported 4 billion ONE had been created, but a later reconstruction put the real number at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions. That's a supply inflation of about 750 times the original total.
The team rolled back the chain on Aug. 21, discarding more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive. But the damage was done. Harmony now cites threats from state actors and AI agents as reasons for retiring the network entirely.
How the migration would work
Under the new proposal, a snapshot at the final block will distribute new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards move into governor vaults, with token supply and emissions unchanged. Smart contracts, liquidity pools, and multisig safes won't migrate automatically. Users are urged to exit smart contracts before Sept. 10.
Validators may begin shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Sept. 10. That's the same day the window to exit contracts closes, so the timeline is tight.
Compensation and the future
A proposed $1.37 million compensation pool would pay governors and delegators over four quarters, but it's tied to shutdown and service conditions. Future ONE emissions will be repurposed toward Harmony's AI-video initiative, a pivot that explains the AI-agent threat mention.
What's still up in the air
The proposal is non-binding. Harmony hasn't disclosed the final block or airdrop date, and the exact mechanics of the snapshot remain unclear. The Sept. 10 validator shutdown is a hard deadline, but whether the network actually goes dark that day depends on how many validators follow through.
For now, the plan is a proposal, not a done deal. The next concrete step is the Sept. 10 deadline for users to exit smart contracts, and the validator shutdown that follows.
