Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has refused to assist Harmony with its latest exploit and urged other researchers not to work on the case for free, citing the project’s handling of outside as
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has refused to assist Harmony with its latest exploit and urged other researchers not to work on the case for free, citing the project’s handling of outside assistance following its $100 million Horizon Bridge hack in 2022.
The dispute comes as Harmony asks exchanges to freeze addresses linked to the latest exploit and prepares a network rollback, escalating containment efforts after roughly 4 billion ONE were created without authorization.
The new tokens represented about 26% of ONE’s pre-exploit supply, with roughly 2.8 billion ONE subsequently moved toward exchanges. The unauthorized mint and resulting collapse in ONE’s market price emerged earlier Wednesday.
ZachXBT said he would not track the latest Harmony exploit and argued that other investigators should also avoid providing unpaid assistance.
He accused Harmony of taking advantage of researchers who helped trace funds after the 2022 Horizon Bridge theft, claiming substantial freezes were secured without the contributors receiving compensation.
I will not be tracking this incident and think no one should assist them for free, ZachXBT wrote.
He said researchers who helped with the earlier case received no reward despite work that contributed to frozen funds and subsequent law-enforcement activity.
The compensation claim is ZachXBT’s account of the earlier response. Harmony has not publicly addressed that allegation in its latest incident updates.
The earlier $100 million Horizon Bridge theft was linked to North Korean actors shortly after the June 2022 breach, when investigators traced stolen Ether through Tornado Cash and other services.
The FBI later formally attributed the theft to Lazarus Group and APT38, cyber units associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In January 2023, the attackers routed more than $60 million of the stolen ETH through Railgun before sending part of the proceeds to virtual asset service providers and converting them into Bitcoin. Coordination with those platforms resulted in a portion of the funds being frozen.
Harmony initially offered a $1 million bounty following the bridge attack before increasing its recovery offer as attempts to retrieve the stolen assets continued.
Harmony is now pursuing a more aggressive response to the latest breach. The team has distributed attacker addresses to exchanges and requested freezes while preparing a patch and rollback intended to reverse the unauthorized ONE creation.
A rollback would require the network to revert to a state before the exploit and discard subsequent affected state changes. Tokens already deposited onto centralized exchanges create an additional recovery problem because those assets may have moved beyond Harmony’s direct onchain control.
Harmony has not yet published a technical post-mortem identifying how the roughly 4 billion ONE were created or confirmed how much of the 2.8 billion ONE sent toward exchanges has been frozen.
The network’s latest public response remains focused on exchange containment, deployment of a patch and execution of the proposed rollback.
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