Harmony will retire its 2019 Layer-1 mainnet and reissue ONE as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Validators may stop running nodes on September 10, and holders must exit contracts, multisigs and
Harmony Protocol has published two non-binding proposals to shut down the sharded Layer-1 network it launched in 2019 and reissue its native ONE token on Ethereum as an ERC-20 asset, redirecting the project into an AI video business. The team blames threats from state-level attackers and AI agents. The real trigger sits closer to home: an August exploit that forged trillions of ONE, followed by a rollback that erased days of legitimate transactions.
Harmony asks ordinary holders to do nothing. It captures a snapshot at the final block, then airdrops fresh ERC-20 ONE to the same addresses on Ethereum. Exchange balances, delegations and validator rewards are covered. Anything sitting in liquidity pools, multisig safes or DeFi positions is not, and those funds vanish after the last block. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards route into governance treasuries rather than back to wallets.
Snapshot Taken at the final block Airdrop Same wallet on Ethereum, no claim Supply Cap and emissions unchanged Stakes & rewards Routed to governance treasuries LPs & DeFi Not migratable, lost after final block Compensation $1.372M over four quarters
The exploit hit on August 12. Harmony traced it to a cross-shard receipt verification flaw that let a valid receipt be processed twice, minting ONE with no matching debit anywhere on the ledger. A researcher first flagged about 4 billion forged tokens, roughly a quarter of circulating supply. That was only the first wave. Harmony’s own reconstruction later put the full total near 3.01 trillion ONE, spread across six transactions and four wallets, one of which moved close to 2.4 trillion in under two minutes.
~4B First-wave estimate ~3.01T Full forged issuance ~2.4T Moved by one wallet, ~$3B 141k+ Blocks discarded 109,441 Transactions erasedHarmony picked the option it called least risky and critics call heresy. Validators rolled the chain back to an August 11 checkpoint, resetting both shards and wiping the forged supply. The reset also deleted every legitimate swap, trade and staking action inside that window, which is what turned a technical recovery into a crisis of confidence.
Harmony’s justification points at adversaries too strong for an independent chain to resist. Most developers read it as an exit ramp. The project never fully recovered from the June 2022 Horizon bridge hack, when attackers linked to the Lazarus Group drained roughly $100 million, and placing that beside a bug that let someone counterfeit trillions of tokens makes the external-threat framing look like cover for architectural weakness. A fairer counterpoint exists. Ethereum now offers cheap execution and deep liquidity, so a team that can neither defend nor cost-justify its own network has a rational case for folding back in.
The second proposal repurposes ONE. Harmony’s new pitch is a platform where users prompt, remix and extend video stories, with AI agents branching them into fresh content. Future emissions would subsidize GPU demand, and former validators would run generation and review nodes, staking the ERC-20 ONE for uptime-based rewards. Harmony claims a compliant operator could earn up to $1 million in first-year ecosystem revenue, and that early promoters could take 30% of the $10 monthly subscriptions they refer. None of it is binding yet.
ONE trades near $0.0012, with a market cap around $18 million and a rank outside the top 800 tokens. Against its all-time high of $0.38, that is a fall of about 99.7%. It bottomed near $0.0007 right after the exploit before recovering part of the drop. The shallow capitalization matters in practice: liquidity is thin enough that modest orders swing the price hard, so the coin stays volatile regardless of news. For the migration, a base this low means the airdrop hands holders a token whose value now rests almost entirely on an unbuilt product.
Verification is the next real test. Harmony has promised to publish the token contract, the snapshot calculation and the airdrop scripts for public audit, and that code will show whether balances map cleanly or strand edge cases. Custodial holders face a separate uncertainty, since the snapshot claims to cover exchange balances but no exchange is obligated to credit an Ethereum airdrop. Harmony is not alone in the corner it painted itself into: Ravencoin weighed its own rollback the same month, a sign that the immutability fight Harmony reopened is spreading to other chains.
The post Harmony Shuts Down Mainnet, Migrates ONE to Ethereum appeared first on ETHNews.
