Interesting Ethereum news: ETH trades around $2500, up a modest 0.05% on the day, as the network absorbs news that another layer-1 chain is folding into its ecosystem. Harmony, the seven-year-old Ethereum-compatible blockchain behind the ONE token, has proposed shutting down its independent chain entirely and migrating ONE to Ethereum as an ERC-20 asset.
The plan involves a final network snapshot, an airdrop to matching wallet addresses, and a hard deadline. One that leaves certain holders exposed if they miss it.
Under the proposal, Harmony would record all ONE balances at a final block and issue equivalent ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, covering wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and exchange balances, with no manual claims required.
Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, and Harmony is urging users to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026. The move follows an August 12 exploit in which an attacker allegedly minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens (about 26% of total supply) pushing Harmony from damage control toward what looks like an exit strategy.
Harmony vừa đề xuất đóng Layer 1, chuyển ONE sang Ethereum và dồn nguồn lực sang AI video chỉ vài tuần sau vụ hack hơn 3 nghìn tỷ ONE. Theo kế hoạch, blockchain sẽ chốt số dư rồi đổi ONE thành token ERC-20, còn validator có thể chuyển sang vai trò AI operator.… https://t.co/EVacOo1Nlj pic.twitter.com/7il78YetTN
— Faustino (@77bncvbsdcg) September 7, 2026
Ethereum’s post-Merge infrastructure has increasingly become the default landing spot for smaller chains seeking security they can’t build alone, a pattern explored in earlier coverage of Ethereum’s network evolution. Harmony’s citation of “state-sponsored attackers and AI agents” as a rationale for sunsetting also echoes broader concerns about protocol-level security that Ethereum itself has had to address across its validator and smart contract layers.
EXPLORE: Trade Crypto on Kraken Today
Ethereum News: Can ETH Price Hold Its Higher-High Structure This Week? ETH is currently priced at 2508, with intraday range between $2,492.26 and $2,534.08. Coingecko shows 24-hour volume near $11B: volume that suggests active but not frenzied trading. Analysts noted ETH entered September at $2,452 after printing its first higher high of the current cycle, a technical detail that keeps the medium-term structure tilted bullish.
Support sits in the low-$2,400s near that recent higher low; resistance clusters around the mid-$2,500s before the psychological $2,700–$3,000 band comes into play.
Bull case: a clean break above $2,534 confirms continuation toward $2,700. Base case: consolidation between $2,450 and $2,534 while the market digests Harmony migration flows. Bear case: a slide below $2,400 invalidates the higher-low structure.
LiquidChain Presale Eyes Cross-Chain Upside as Ethereum Stalls at Resistance
Despite this Ethereum news, ETH’s chart isn’t built for the kind of explosive growth that can multiply a small investment many times over. Not at a market cap north of $300 billion. That’s the trade-off with established assets: stability over breakout potential. For traders looking further out on the risk curve, early-stage infrastructure plays are where the numbers start to look different.
LiquidChain ($LIQUID) is a Layer 3 (L3) infrastructure project positioning itself as the connective tissue between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity — a single execution environment rather than three siloed ones. The presale is priced at $0.014953 with over $961K raised so far. Its core pitch rests on a Unified Liquidity Layer and Single-Step Execution, paired with a Deploy-Once Architecture that lets developers build once and reach all three ecosystems. As always, DYOR.Research LiquidChain before Ethereum’s next resistance test plays out.
Layer 3 Is Already Here, Smart Money Knows It – Do You?
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Disclaimer: Coinspeaker is committed to providing unbiased and transparent reporting. This article aims to deliver accurate and timely information but should not be taken as financial or investment advice. Since market conditions can change rapidly, we encourage you to verify information on your own and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content.
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Daniel Frances is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. A crypto native since 2017, Daniel leverages his background in on-chain analytics to author evidence-based reports and deep-dive guides. He holds certifications from The Blockchain Council, and is dedicated to providing "information gain" that cuts through market hype to find real-world blockchain utility.
The plan would snapshot ONE at the final block and redirect emissions to an AI video business, but Harmony urged users to exit smart contracts before Sept. 10 because onchain apps and liquidity pools will not migrate.
Harmony has proposed fully sunsetting its blockchain after seven years and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum, with holders receiving new ONE through a final-block snapshot and airdrop. Token emissions would be redirected to a new business the team calls the “Remix Economy for AI Video.”
Under the proposal, the snapshot would cover ONE held in user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges. New tokens would be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum without a separate claim process, while delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would go to individual governor vaults.
The transition creates a Sept. 10 deadline — Thursday — for users with ONE deployed onchain. Harmony said multisig safes, liquidity pools and apps cannot be migrated, and urged users to exit all smart contracts before that date. Validators may begin shutting down nodes on Sept. 10.
Harmony attributed the proposal to security risks, saying “the threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great.” The notice describes the proposal as non-binding and says all plans are subject to change.
What Harmony Is Pivoting ToHarmony said newly issued tokens would fund a video platform in which creators publish open prompts and assets that others can fork, with AI agents generating additional clips from each remix. “Tokens issued through emissions will now be allocated to our new mission,” the team said, adding that it would take “governor feedback.”
The team said it would “bootstrap this economy with creators and operators who make AI videos,” and that “advertising could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users.” Harmony did not publish user numbers or a launch date for the platform.
Harmony said ONE’s total supply and emission rate would remain unchanged after the move. The project also said it would publish the ERC-20 contract, governor-vault contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public audit.
Exchange Gap Narrowed to 6.58B ONEThe proposal lands while Harmony is still reconciling the August incident that prompted it. In a separate update, Harmony said the exchange-related ONE gap tied to the Aug. 11 incident had been adjusted to 6.581 billion from about 10.234 billion.
Harmony said the revision followed reconciliation with Binance, Binance.US, Gate, KuCoin, MEXC and OKX, and came from matching 295 cross-exchange transfers totaling roughly 3.493 billion ONE and accounting for circular transfers. The team said the reduction “does not equate to newly recovered funds,” and that Binance data remained provisional while some Gate and OKX figures awaited verification.
Harmony said exchanges had frozen ONE balances and proceeds linked to the attacker, and that “the current priority is to coordinate the resumption of ONE deposits, withdrawals, and trading as soon as possible.” Each exchange would announce its own timing.
The incident prompted Harmony to patch two verification paths after reports of unauthorized ONE issuance. As The Defiant reported, Harmony asked exchanges to block four wallets, paused its bridge and evaluated rollback options. Harmony did not confirm onchain account Juiceberg’s claim that four billion unauthorized ONE had been created.
Current Network FootprintHarmony’s staking dashboard showed about 3.04 billion ONE staked across the network, with an effective median stake of 6.83 million ONE. The chain had $146,337 in decentralized finance total value locked and $4,611 in 24-hour DEX volume, according to DefiLlama, which lists the chain as deprecated. Chain fees over the same period were $2.35.
ONE traded at about $0.00071, down 1.3% over 24 hours and 2.3% over the week, for a market capitalization near $10.6 million, according to CoinGecko. The token reached $0.379 in October 2021.
Validator TermsFor validators, Harmony set aside a $1.372 million transition pool, which it said equals the network-wide rewards issued during the year before the Aug. 11 incident. Harmony said validators who shut down on time, sign an agreement, retain their stakes and serve as governors in its new initiative would receive compensation in four quarterly installments.
Harmony has told ONE holders to leave smart contracts by Sept. 10 because liquidity pools, multisig vaults and on-chain applications cannot move to Ethereum under its proposed network closure.
Summary
Sept. 10 is the deadline for users to remove ONE and other assets from Harmony-based smart contracts. Wallet and exchange balances would qualify for an automatic Ethereum airdrop after the final network snapshot. Liquidity pools, multisig vaults, and decentralized applications cannot be transferred through the planned migration. Eligible validators and delegators could receive payments from a $1.372 million pool over four quarters. Harmony said users do not need to file a claim for replacement ONE tokens, but the automatic process only covers balances captured in the final blockchain snapshot.
The warning creates two different paths for holders. ONE kept in a standard wallet would be recorded and recreated on Ethereum, while tokens deposited into decentralized finance protocols may need to be withdrawn before the deadline.
Harmony has not disclosed when it will produce the final block or complete the airdrop. Sept. 10 is therefore an exit deadline for smart-contract users and the date from which validators may begin closing their nodes, not the confirmed date of the mainnet shutdown.
Why ONE holders must leave smart contracts Under the proposal, Harmony would record ONE balances at the blockchain’s final block before issuing replacement tokens as ERC-20 assets on Ethereum. Covered balances include tokens in personal wallets, staking delegations, unclaimed validator rewards, and centralized exchange accounts.
The project said the new tokens would be sent to the same Ethereum-compatible addresses listed in the snapshot. Since Harmony uses addresses compatible with Ethereum’s format, holders would not need to complete a separate claim or submit personal information.
Smart contracts present a more complex problem. Although the snapshot can record how much ONE a contract holds, it cannot reproduce the full state, ownership rules, or functions of every application on Ethereum.
Liquidity pools may contain two or more assets and issue separate liquidity provider tokens representing each user’s share. Multisig vaults depend on contract rules that require several approved signers, while lending markets track collateral, loans, interest, and liquidation conditions. Harmony said such applications and positions cannot be copied automatically.
Users with funds in decentralized exchanges, lending services, or other Harmony applications must therefore interact with the relevant protocol and withdraw before Sept. 10. The project has not announced a separate recovery route for assets that remain locked in contracts after the deadline.
Removing liquidity may also require users to convert liquidity provider tokens back into their underlying assets. Any protocol-specific waiting period, withdrawal restriction, or unavailable interface could affect whether a user can complete the process before the cutoff.
Harmony has not published a complete list of affected applications. Holders will need to review their wallet activity and check whether any ONE or other tokens remain deposited in smart contracts rather than sitting directly at their addresses.
Exchange users will depend on platform support ONE held on centralized exchanges is expected to qualify for the migration because Harmony plans to include exchange wallets in the final snapshot. The team said it would work with trading platforms to replace existing ONE balances and move listings to the ERC-20 version.
Individual customers would not control the migration process when an exchange holds their tokens. Each platform may set its own suspension schedule for deposits, withdrawals, and trading while it updates its wallet infrastructure.
Harmony has not named the exchanges supporting the move or released their operating schedules. Exchange users may need to monitor official notices to determine whether their platform will manage the conversion, require a withdrawal, or discontinue ONE trading.
Self-custody users face a different concern. The replacement tokens are supposed to arrive at the Ethereum address matching their Harmony wallet, so holders must retain access to the private key or recovery phrase controlling that address.
Sending tokens to another wallet before the snapshot would change which address receives the Ethereum allocation. Harmony has not yet announced the snapshot block, meaning users moving funds after leaving DeFi applications must continue tracking official updates.
The proposal would keep ONE’s total supply and issuance schedule unchanged. Harmony also plans to publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations, and airdrop scripts for public review, although those materials were not available when the plan was announced.
As previously covered by crypto.news, the migration forms part of Harmony’s proposal to retire the Layer 1 network it launched in 2019. The team cited security threats from state-backed attackers and AI agents when explaining why it no longer wanted to operate an independent blockchain.
Validators can close nodes from Sept. 10 Validators may begin shutting down their nodes on Sept. 10 under a separate transition process. Harmony has allocated $1.372 million to compensate eligible validators and delegators, with payments scheduled over four quarterly installments.
Receiving compensation requires validators to stop their nodes within the stated period, sign an agreement, maintain their stakes, and continue working as governors. Harmony said the fund would also cover the difference between rewards earned at a validator’s last block and the network’s eventual final block.
Delegated ONE and unclaimed validator rewards would be placed into individual governor vaults rather than handled like ordinary wallet balances. The team has not explained how the $1.372 million will be divided or published the agreements that validators must sign.
Governors could later remain in the project’s decision-making structure or participate in Harmony’s proposed AI video business as operators or affiliates. Under the plan, future ONE issuance would support what the team calls a video “remix economy.”
Harmony said creators would publish prompts and other materials that users could modify, with AI agents producing additional video clips from each branch. Operators would manage video generation, distribution, and moderation, while staking and service uptime would affect their rewards.
The project has projected up to $1 million in combined operator revenue during the first year and plans to subsidize graphics-processing hardware. Harmony has also proposed a $10 monthly subscription and a recurring 30% commission for referred subscriptions, though neither figure represents confirmed revenue.
U.S. holders may need to preserve migration records American holders may need records showing their original ONE purchases, withdrawals from Harmony applications, final snapshot balances, and receipt of the Ethereum tokens.
The IRS classifies digital assets as property and generally requires taxpayers to report sales, exchanges, and other disposals. Its digital asset guidance also requires taxpayers to answer a digital asset question on federal income tax returns.
Harmony describes the Ethereum asset as a replacement version of ONE with the same supply and emission rate. The IRS has not issued a decision on the tax treatment of this specific migration, leaving the result dependent on the transaction’s structure and each holder’s circumstances.
Closing a DeFi position before Sept. 10 could involve more than a wallet transfer. A user may need to exchange a liquidity provider token, repay a loan, remove collateral, or swap assets, and each action can create separate records relevant to U.S. reporting.
Exchange customers may receive transaction information through Form 1099-DA, where the reporting rules apply. The IRS states that taxpayers must still report taxable digital asset activity even when a broker does not issue the form.
Harmony deadline follows a disruptive August exploit The deadline follows an August security incident in which attackers used a cross-shard verification flaw to create unauthorized ONE. Harmony’s later investigation found that more than 3 trillion tokens had been generated through six transactions.
One connected wallet attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE within 106 seconds, according to the project’s reconstruction. Of that total, 477 transactions succeeded and moved 2.385 trillion tokens into wallets, exchanges, decentralized exchange routers, liquidity pools, bridges, and staking accounts.
Harmony initially proposed a two-shard blockchain rollback to checkpoints recorded at 11:25:37 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11. The plan would discard 141,628 shard 0 blocks containing 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions.
The network classified 104,545 of the regular transactions as automated activity, including almost 100,000 connected to decentralized exchange automation. Legitimate transactions completed after the checkpoints would also be removed under the rollback.
A separate staking flaw disclosed in December 2023 had previously created 146.28 million ONE across 74 delegator addresses. Harmony fixed that incident through an emergency hard fork at block 51,118,080.
In June 2022, attackers also stole about $100 million from Harmony’s Horizon Bridge after compromising keys controlling its multisig wallet. The project later revised its recovery plan after community opposition forced it to withdraw a proposal to mint 4.97 billion ONE for victim compensation.
PANews, September 8 - Harmony released an update on the exchange reconciliation following the August 11 incident, stating that it has verified on-chain deposits, withdrawals, and cross-platform fund flows with Binance, Gate, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, and Binance.US. Exchange teams have frozen large amounts of ONE balances and hacker proceeds. The current priority is to coordinate the resumption of ONE deposits, withdrawals, and trading as soon as possible, with specific resumption times to be announced separately by each exchange.
Harmony stated that after matching 295 cross-exchange transfers totaling approximately 3.493 billion ONE, and adjusting for circular transfers and return funds, the provisional gap has decreased from approximately 10.234 billion ONE to 6.581 billion ONE, a reduction of about 3.653 billion ONE. This change is due to adjustments in reconciliation methodology and does not equate to newly recovered funds. Among these, Binance's data remains a provisional upper-bound estimate, while some data from Gate and OKX are still pending final verification.
In addition, this work will be coordinated with the ONE migration and validator transition proposal. According to the proposal, validators may cease operations starting from 22:00 Beijing time on September 10.
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Harmony has proposed closing its seven-year-old Layer 1 blockchain, issuing ONE on Ethereum and directing future token emissions to a new AI video project.
Summary
ONE balances would be recorded at Harmony’s final block and recreated as ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. Users must leave smart contracts by Sept. 10 because applications and liquidity pools cannot migrate automatically. Harmony has reserved $1.372 million to compensate eligible validators and delegators over four quarters. The proposal follows an August exploit that created trillions of unauthorized ONE tokens and prompted a rollback plan. Harmony said in a Sept. 6 post that the mainnet’s exposure to “state actors” and “AI agents” has made continued operation too risky, leading the team to propose retiring the network it launched in 2019.
The plan remains nonbinding, and Harmony has not announced when it will produce the blockchain’s final block. The team also has not explained whether validators will decide the proposal through the network’s existing governance process.
Under Harmony’s published governance rules, a proposal must receive votes representing at least 51% of total stake weight. Approval requires support from 66.7% of the participating voting power after a seven-day introduction period and a 14-day vote.
Harmony would recreate ONE balances on Ethereum Rather than asking holders to exchange their tokens manually, Harmony plans to take a snapshot at the final block and distribute replacement ONE tokens on Ethereum. The ERC-20 version would go to the same addresses recorded in the snapshot, removing the need for individual claims.
The snapshot would cover ONE held in personal wallets, staking delegations, unclaimed validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchange accounts. Harmony plans to coordinate with exchanges so that their existing ONE listings can move to the Ethereum-based token.
Delegated tokens and unpaid validator rewards would be handled separately through individual governor vaults. According to the proposal, the total ONE supply and its scheduled issuance rate would remain unchanged during the transition.
To allow outside review of the process, Harmony said it would publish the Ethereum token contract, snapshot calculations, and airdrop scripts. The project has not yet released the contract address or the final snapshot method.
While ordinary wallet balances would be included automatically, several types of holdings cannot be copied to Ethereum in their current form. Harmony said multisignature vaults, liquidity pools, and applications running on the mainnet would not migrate with the token balances.
Users have therefore been asked to withdraw from smart contracts before Sept. 10. Anyone who leaves assets inside a decentralized exchange pool, lending market, or another on-chain application could face complications because the protocol state and its related contracts will not be recreated on Ethereum.
For centralized exchange customers, the process will depend partly on each platform’s support for the migration. Harmony has proposed moving exchange-held balances and listings to the ERC-20 token, although it has not published a list of participating exchanges or their individual timetables.
Validators face separate shutdown conditions Beginning Sept. 10, validators would be allowed to turn off their nodes as the network prepares for its final block. Harmony has set aside $1.372 million for eligible validators and their delegators, with payments scheduled across four quarterly installments.
Eligibility carries several conditions. Validators must stop their nodes within the required period, retain their stakes, sign an agreement, and continue serving as governors after the mainnet closes. The pool would also cover the difference between the rewards earned at a validator’s last block and the rewards it would have received through the final network block.
Harmony has not disclosed how the $1.372 million will be divided among validators and delegators. Final payments may depend on stake levels and compliance with the proposed agreements, according to the terms described by the team.
Operators could later remain in governance or join Harmony’s planned “remix economy” as operators or affiliates. Future ONE emissions would fund the new AI video initiative, although Harmony said governors could still provide feedback on the arrangement.
Under the proposed model, video creators would publish prompts and related assets that fans could copy and alter. AI agents would turn the resulting branches into additional clips, while operators would manage video generation, distribution and content moderation.
Harmony said staking levels and service uptime would affect operator rewards. The project also plans to subsidize graphics processing hardware during the first year and has projected up to $1 million in combined operator revenue, subject to the service and staking requirements.
The business model includes a proposed $10 monthly subscription. Affiliates would receive a recurring 30% commission from users they refer, while Harmony estimated that advertising could produce tens of millions of dollars if the platform reached 1 million users. Both revenue figures remain projections from the project rather than confirmed income.
August exploit pushed Harmony toward a shutdown The retirement proposal follows an August security breach that produced unauthorized ONE tokens and forced the team to consider reversing several days of blockchain activity.
On Aug. 12, crypto.news reported an unauthorized mint after on-chain researcher Juiceberg estimated that almost 4 billion ONE had been created through empty blocks. The researcher claimed that about 2.8 billion tokens reached centralized exchanges, but Harmony had not confirmed either figure when it first disclosed the incident.
Harmony’s later investigation found that more than 3 trillion ONE had been generated through six transactions. The team linked the exploit to a weakness in cross-shard receipt verification that allowed valid receipts to be processed repeatedly without matching deductions elsewhere on the network.
One wallet connected to the activity attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE within 106 seconds, according to Harmony’s reconstruction. Of the attempted transfers, 477 succeeded and moved a combined 2.385 trillion ONE.
Investigators traced the created tokens to standalone wallets, exchange accounts, decentralized exchange routers, liquidity pools, bridge contracts, wrapped ONE and staking wallets. Harmony said it contacted exchanges, bridges, and law-enforcement agencies while tracking the assets.
By Aug. 17, the team had proposed returning both network shards to checkpoints recorded at 11:25:37 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11. Shard 0 would keep block 92,730,034 and restart from the next block, while shard 1 would return to block 94,978,278 despite not being the origin of the unauthorized mint.
The rollback would remove 141,628 consecutive blocks from shard 0, including 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Harmony classified 104,545 of the regular transactions, or 95.8%, as automated activity, with almost 100,000 tied to decentralized exchange automation.
At the time, the team considered migration but said it would cause more disruption than a rollback. Less than a month later, moving ONE to Ethereum became part of the proposed mainnet closure.
U.S. holders may need detailed migration records For U.S. token holders, the migration may create tax-record concerns even if Harmony distributes ERC-20 ONE automatically. The IRS treats digital assets as property and requires taxpayers to report sales, exchanges, and other taxable disposals.
IRS guidance says exchanging one digital asset for another that differs materially in kind or extent can produce a capital gain or loss. Harmony describes the replacement as the same ONE token with unchanged supply and emissions, but the agency has not issued guidance addressing this specific mainnet-to-Ethereum migration.
U.S. holders may therefore need to preserve their original purchase records, wallet history, the final Harmony snapshot, and the value of the Ethereum token when received. Exchange customers should also retain any migration notices and Form 1099-DA information supplied by their platforms, since the IRS says taxpayers remain responsible for reporting taxable activity even when a broker does not provide a form.
Harmony had faced security problems before the August incident. In December 2023, the project disclosed that faulty staking logic had created 146.28 million ONE across 74 delegator addresses, prompting an emergency hard fork at block 51,118,080.
Its largest earlier loss came in June 2022, when attackers stole nearly $100 million from the Horizon cross-chain bridge after gaining control of keys used by its multisignature wallet. Harmony responded by raising its hacker bounty to $10 million and working with exchanges, analytics firms, and law enforcement.
A month after the bridge attack, developers proposed minting 4.97 billion ONE to reimburse affected users over three years. Community members opposed the resulting dilution, and Harmony later withdrew the plan in favor of a recovery program that would not add tokens through a hard fork.
TLDR Harmony proposed shutting down its layer-1 blockchain and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum. The move comes weeks after an exploit led to a rollback that discarded over 109,000 transactions. Validators can stop their nodes starting Sept. 10, with a $1.372 million pool set aside for those who transition smoothly. Harmony plans to pivot into an AI video “remix economy” business using the migrated token. Users must exit all smart contracts before Sept. 10, since multisig safes and liquidity pools cannot be migrated. Harmony has proposed sunsetting its layer-1 blockchain and moving its native ONE token to Ethereum. The announcement came seven years after the network’s mainnet first launched.
The proposal was shared on X on Sunday. Harmony said it would take a final network snapshot, issue ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum, and migrate exchange listings.
Harmony described the plan as non-binding. It did not say when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would go through the network’s validator-led governance process.
Under Harmony’s existing governance rules, elected validators can create proposals. Unelected validators can vote, with voting power based on total stake. Passing a proposal requires 51% of total stake weight to participate and 66.7% support after a voting period.
Harmony said security threats played a role in the decision. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the team wrote in its announcement.
“Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes, but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network,” Harmony added.
The team said validators would be offered new roles in a proposed AI video initiative. This new venture would center on a small group of AI video creators who publish open prompts and assets.
Fans could then fork, or “remix,” those originals. AI agents would turn each fork into more video clips. Harmony said the plan could generate advertising revenue from a large user base.
How the ONE Token Migration Would Work Under the plan, all ONE balances would be recorded at the network’s final block. New ERC-20 tokens would then be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.
The snapshot would cover wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchanges. Harmony said no action or claim would be required from holders.
Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain applications cannot be migrated, though. Harmony urged users to exit all smart contracts before Sept. 10.
Validators can begin shutting down their nodes on Sept. 10. Harmony set aside $1.372 million to compensate validators who stop on time, keep their stakes, and agree to serve as governors in the new initiative.
The token’s total supply and emission rate will stay the same. Newly issued tokens will go toward funding the AI video initiative, Harmony said. ONE was trading near $0.00073 as of Sunday.
This proposal follows a security incident that took place less than four weeks earlier. On Aug. 12, Harmony said it was looking into a rollback after reports that an attacker minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens.
A later review by Harmony found the attacker had actually minted more than 3 trillion ONE tokens across six transactions. An outside account estimated that about 2.8 billion tokens had reached exchanges.
The exploit stemmed from a flaw in Harmony’s cross-shard receipt verification system. This flaw let valid receipts get processed multiple times, letting the attacker mint new tokens without a matching debit elsewhere.
On Aug. 17, Harmony said it would revert the blockchain to an Aug. 11 checkpoint. That rollback discarded 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions.
This was not Harmony’s first major security incident. In June 2022, its Horizon cross-chain bridge was exploited, with attackers stealing crypto assets worth close to $100 million.
The FBI later attributed that 2022 bridge attack to North Korean state-backed hacking groups Lazarus Group and APT 38.
Harmony has proposed shutting down its network and moving its ONE token to Ethereum as the project responds to growing threats from state actors and AI agents, according to a statement issued on Sept. 6.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony stated. Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes—but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network.”
Launched through a Binance Launchpad IEO in 2019, Harmony is a sharded layer 1 blockchain that combines Ethereum compatibility with an architecture designed for high throughput and low transaction costs. The project attracted funding from a group of crypto investors, including Binance Labs, now YZi Labs, HashKey Capital, and Animoca Brands.
The proposed transition would allow validators to cease operating beginning Sept. 10. Harmony plans to compensate validators for the difference in emission rewards between their final block and the network’s final block, with approximately $1.4 million set aside for the validator compensation program.
Validators can also continue as governors or participate in Harmony’s planned AI video economy, the team added. GPU operators could receive first-year subsidies and support aimed at generating up to $1 million in combined revenue, while affiliates would initially receive a 30% recurring commission on referred $10 monthly subscriptions.
Harmony would snapshot ONE holdings at the network’s final block and airdrop equivalent new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would instead go to individual governor vaults, while centralized exchange listings would be migrated.
The project said ONE’s total supply and emission rate would not change. The team plans to publish the Ethereum token contract, governor vault contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public audit.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
In brief Harmony says threats from AI agents and state actors have become too great to keep its blockchain running. The team proposes moving ONE to Ethereum and redirecting token emissions toward AI video. The plan is non-binding, with users urged to exit smart contracts before September 10. Harmony, once a prominent competitor to Ethereum, has proposed shutting down its blockchain on Sunday, saying threats from AI agents and state actors had become too great.
The announcement comes as the cryptocurrency industry attempts to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks enabled by frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.
Myriad: Ethereum's next price move? Click to make your prediction.“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the Harmony Team wrote on X. “Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes—but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network.”
To mitigate the threat, Harmony is proposing to move Harmony’s ONE token to Ethereum and use newly issued tokens to fund the ecosystem's new “The Remix Economy for AI Video” initiative. Validators, who verify network transactions, could take governance roles or join the AI-video business.
Launched in 2019, Harmony is a layer-1 blockchain that uses proof-of-stake, where validators commit tokens to help secure the network, and sharding, which divides transactions into smaller groups that work in parallel. The design aims to address the “blockchain trilemma” by increasing capacity without compromising security or concentrating control.
Moving ONE to Ethereum
According to Harmony, the migration would record ONE balances at the network’s final block—a process called a snapshot—to determine each holder’s allocation of replacement tokens on Ethereum. It would cover wallets, staked tokens, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchanges.
Replacement tokens would be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, with delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards going to individual governor vaults. Exchange listings would also move to the new token.
Although the proposal says holders would not need to submit a claim, users with assets in smart contracts face a separate deadline.
“Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain apps cannot be migrated; users are urged to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026,” the Harmony Team wrote.
Harmony also proposes paying eligible validators and their delegators from a $1.372 million pool in four quarterly installments, provided validators retain their stakes, sign an agreement, and serve as governors.
“The ONE token’s total supply and emission rate will remain unchanged. Tokens issued through emissions will now be allocated to our new mission, “The Remix Economy for AI Video”, subject to governor feedback,” the team wrote.
AI and Crypto Attacks
The migration proposal is the latest in examples of attacks leading to increased scrutiny of blockchain networks.
In August, Harmony confirmed an exploit after an attacker created roughly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens. The team released a patch and said it was considering a rollback, which would reverse transactions by restoring an earlier version of the blockchain.
The X post on Sunday underscores how AI is playing a larger role in crypto security, with companies reporting suspected AI-assisted attacks and developers using the technology to find and fix vulnerabilities.
In July, Coldcard maker Coinkite said it suspected an attacker used AI to find a flaw that made wallet keys easier to guess—a vulnerability its own AI review missed. The company overhauled its security in August after thefts exceeded $100 million.
Following the Coldcard attack, developers formed the Bitcoin Red Team to find vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. The group combines AI models, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, with human review to examine wallets, payment applications, and other Bitcoin software, then privately alerts developers to flaws.
The team grew to about 20 to 25 volunteers, according to pseudonymous member and developer Calle. He said it had found no issues in Bitcoin’s underlying protocol.
“The reason why the Bitcoin Red Team exists right now is because we need to get ahead of the attackers as fast as possible,” Calle told Decrypt.
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Harmony announced Sunday that it plans to sunset its Layer 1 blockchain and proposed migrating its native ONE (ONE) token to Ethereum, citing continued security threats.
"The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great," Harmony wrote in its X announcement. "Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes — but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network."
Harmony said it would help validators transition into new roles in the platform's proposed new initiative involving a "remix economy" with AI video creators.
The new initiative model revolves around a small group of AI video creators that would publish open prompts and assets. Fans of the creators would fork, or "remix" those originals, and AI agents would turn each fork into many more clips, according to Harmony.
"We will bootstrap this economy with creators and operators who make AI videos," Harmony said. "Advertising could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users."
Validators can cease their node operations starting Sept. 10, Harmony noted. The team also said it has set aside a pool of $1.37 million to compensate validators who sunset their nodes, sign an agreement, maintain their stakes, and transition to "governors" in its new initiative.
Migrating ONE Harmony has proposed airdropping new ONE tokens on Ethereum and migrating exchange listings, without requiring any action from holders, delegators, or validators.
The platform said it seeks to snapshot tokens held in user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchanges at the final block. New tokens would be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, Harmony added.
"Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards will be airdropped to individual governor vaults," Harmony said. "Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain apps cannot be migrated; users are urged to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026."
The token's total supply and emission rate will remain unchanged, while newly issued tokens will be allocated to Harmony's new initiative, the platform said. ONE's price fell 3.86% in the past 24 hours to trade at $0.00073.
ONE Price | The Block Exploits Harmony experienced a major exploit last month where an attacker reportedly minted 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens. A later reconstruction from Harmony identified that the attacker minted more than 3 trillion ONE tokens across six transactions.
The exploit stemmed from a flaw in its cross-shard receipt verification that allowed valid receipts to be processed multiple times, allowing exploiters to mint new ONE tokens without a debit elsewhere. The team also flagged a bug with its pre-staking quorum-checking system.
Following the exploit, Harmony rolled back its network to a point before the exploit where the tokens were forged. It said at the time that it considered migrating ONE token as an option.
August's exploit was not the first major security incident involving Harmony. In June 2022, the project's Horizon cross-chain bridge was exploited. Attackers stole crypto assets valued at nearly $100 million, including Ethereum and various stablecoins. Security experts linked the breach to a compromise of the bridge's multi-signature wallet. In the following year, the FBI attributed the attack to the North Korean state-backed hacker organizations, the Lazarus Group and APT 38.
Ethereum-compatible layer-1 network Harmony proposed sunsetting its blockchain and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum, seven years after launching its mainnet.
On Sunday, Harmony proposed taking a final network snapshot, issuing ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum and migrating exchange listings. Validators would be offered options to stop their nodes, continue as governors, or join its new AI-video initiative.
Harmony described the proposal as non-binding and did not specify when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would be submitted to the network’s validator-led governance process.
Under Harmony’s published governance rules, elected validators can create proposals, while unelected validators may vote, with voting power based on total stake. Passage requires 51% of total stake weight to participate and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction and 14-day vote.
Under the proposal, all ONE balances would be recorded at the network’s final block and new ERC-20 tokens airdropped to the same addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would cover wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges, with no claims required.
However, Harmony said multisig safes, liquidity pools and onchain applications cannot be migrated, urging users to exit all smart contracts before Sept. 10. Validators may begin shutting down that day, with a $1.372 million pool set aside to compensate those that stop on time, retain their stakes and agree to serve as governors.
Harmony proposal comes weeks after an exploitThe proposal comes less than four weeks after an exploit created forged ONE tokens and led Harmony to plan a rollback that would wipe more than 109,000 transactions, marking a potential shift from repairing the network to ending it as an independent blockchain.
On Aug. 12, Harmony said it was considering a rollback after reports that an attacker had minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE, equivalent to about 26% of the supply. An outside account claimed about 2.8 billion tokens reached exchanges, but Harmony had not confirmed the figures at the time.
On Aug. 17, Harmony said it planned to revert the blockchain to an Aug. 11 checkpoint, discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. It said investigators had traced nearly all the forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement.
Magazine: Hugging Face hack exposes the open-weight AI cybersecurity paradox
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Ethereum-compatible layer-1 network Harmony proposed sunsetting its blockchain and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum, seven years after launching its mainnet.
On Sunday, Harmony proposed taking a final network snapshot, issuing ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum and migrating exchange listings. Validators would be offered options to stop their nodes, continue as governors, or join its new AI-video initiative.
Harmony described the proposal as non-binding and did not specify when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would be submitted to the network’s validator-led governance process.
Under Harmony’s published governance rules, elected validators can create proposals, while unelected validators may vote, with voting power based on total stake. Passage requires 51% of total stake weight to participate and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction and 14-day vote.
Under the proposal, all ONE balances would be recorded at the network’s final block and new ERC-20 tokens airdropped to the same addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would cover wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges, with no claims required.
However, Harmony said multisig safes, liquidity pools and onchain applications cannot be migrated, urging users to exit all smart contracts before Sept. 10. Validators may begin shutting down that day, with a $1.372 million pool set aside to compensate those that stop on time, retain their stakes and agree to serve as governors.
Harmony proposal comes weeks after an exploitThe proposal comes less than four weeks after an exploit created forged ONE tokens and led Harmony to plan a rollback that would wipe more than 109,000 transactions, marking a potential shift from repairing the network to ending it as an independent blockchain.
On Aug. 12, Harmony said it was considering a rollback after reports that an attacker had minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE, equivalent to about 26% of the supply. An outside account claimed about 2.8 billion tokens reached exchanges, but Harmony had not confirmed the figures at the time.
On Aug. 17, Harmony said it planned to revert the blockchain to an Aug. 11 checkpoint, discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. It said investigators had traced nearly all the forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement.
Magazine: Hugging Face hack exposes the open-weight AI cybersecurity paradox
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
Harmony, an Ethereum-compatible layer-1 blockchain network, has announced a proposal to sunset its blockchain and migrate its native ONE token to the Ethereum ecosystem. This move comes seven years after Harmony launched its mainnet and follows recent challenges affecting network integrity.
Migration plan detailsThe proposal outlines taking a final network snapshot and issuing ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum, effectively migrating users’ token balances. Harmony intends to coordinate with exchanges to list the new tokens and ensure a smooth transition for existing holders.
Validators, who maintain the operations and security of the Harmony network, would have several options under the proposal: shut down their nodes, shift into governance roles, or participate in the network’s proposed AI-video initiative.
Harmony said holders will not need to make claims, with all ONE balances, staking rewards, validator earnings, and centralized exchange holdings included in the Ethereum airdrop based on the network’s final block snapshot.
The network cautioned, however, that multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain applications cannot be migrated automatically. Harmony recommended users exit all smart contracts before September 10 to avoid asset loss.
A compensation fund of $1.372 million has been allocated for validators who shut down their nodes on time, retain their stakes, and serve as governors during the transition.
Governance and timelineHarmony described the proposal as non-binding. No specific date was provided for producing the final block or initiating the shutdown. Decisions to proceed rely on the network’s governance procedures, which require participation by 51% of total stake weight and 66.7% support among stakeholders following a formal voting process.
According to Harmony’s governance model, only elected validators can create proposals, but all validators, regardless of status, are eligible to vote, with influence determined by the amount of stake held. A proposal is eligible for passage after a seven-day introduction and a 14-day voting window.
Mini dictionary: ERC-20 tokens are a widely used token standard on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing for interoperable digital assets and compatibility across various decentralized applications and exchanges.
StageDescriptionFinal snapshotAll ONE balances, staking rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchange holdings recordedONE ERC-20 airdropERC-20 tokens distributed to Ethereum addresses matching those in the snapshotValidator compensation$1.372 million pool for validators shutting down on time and becoming governorsContract exit deadlineUsers urged to leave smart contracts by September 10Recent security incidentThe proposal follows a security breach less than a month ago in which forged ONE tokens were created, forcing Harmony to consider significant restorative measures. The team revealed that an exploit allowed the unauthorized minting of nearly 4 billion ONE tokens, representing approximately 26% of the coin’s total supply.
Outside parties alleged that about 2.8 billion of the forged tokens may have been sent to exchanges, although Harmony has not publicly verified this figure.
In response to the incident, Harmony announced plans to revert the blockchain to an August 11 checkpoint. This rollback would erase more than 109,000 standard transactions and 315 staking transactions processed after the exploit, shifting the network’s focus from technical repair to formal shutdown.
The team confirmed that investigators had traced nearly all unauthorized tokens to specific wallets or service endpoints. Harmony stated that it is cooperating with exchanges, cross-chain bridges, and law enforcement to address the aftermath.
Harmony will shut down the blockchain it launched in 2019 and migrate its native token, Harmony (ONE), to Ethereum (ETH) as a new ERC-20 asset.
The team cited threats from state actors and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Validators can begin switching off their nodes on Thursday.
Harmony Follows BounceBit Out of the Layer 1 BusinessThe sunset caps a punishing stretch for the network. In August, an exploit minted roughly 4 billion ONE, about 26% of the total supply, and sent the token to a record low of $0.0005735.
Harmony answered with a rollback. The chain was a target long before that. A 2022 breach of its Horizon Bridge drained close to $99.6 million.
Meanwhile, the retreat follows a pattern. BounceBit also retired its Layer 1 in August after an attacker moved 286.5 million BB, reissuing the token on BNB Chain.
The sunset notice did not name the two events, though.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great. Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes—but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network,” the team said.
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What Happens to ONE HoldersHolders do not need to claim anything. Harmony will snapshot balances at the final block, then airdrop new tokens to the same addresses on Ethereum.
Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain applications cannot travel with them. Harmony urged users to exit every smart contract before September 10.
Validators may power down from 7 a.m. Pacific on September 10. A pool worth $1.372 million will pay those who sign an agreement and stay on as governors.
Total supply and the emission rate stay unchanged. Future emissions will instead fund an AI video venture Harmony calls The Remix Economy.
Harmony describes an open library of prompts and assets that fans fork and AI agents expand into dozens of stories per branch. It projects millions of remixes per day and will subsidize operators’ hardware for a year while requiring operators to stake tokens.
Harmony (ONE) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto MarketsMeanwhile, the network’s native token has yet to see the benefits of this pivot. It has dropped over 2% in the past day.
ONE traded near $0.00074 on Monday, roughly 29% above the record low it set on August 12. Its market value is near $11 million, placing it outside the top 1,000 tokens by market cap.
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Key Takeaways Harmony Protocol has announced plans to discontinue its Layer 1 blockchain network after seven years of operation since its 2019 mainnet launch ONE token holders will receive airdropped ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum automatically, requiring no manual intervention Network validators can cease operations starting September 10 and receive compensation from a $1.37 million fund The decision follows a catastrophic August security breach where hackers minted more than 3 trillion unauthorized ONE tokens The project is transitioning to focus on AI-driven video content creation as its new core business model Harmony Protocol, an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 blockchain platform, has unveiled plans to terminate its network operations and transition its native ONE token to the Ethereum ecosystem. The Sunday announcement represents a dramatic transformation for the project, which first went live with its mainnet in 2019.
According to the platform, persistent security vulnerabilities and emerging threats drove the decision. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the team stated in their X platform announcement.
Token Migration Process Details The protocol intends to capture a final network snapshot at the blockchain’s terminal block. Subsequently, newly created ERC-20 ONE tokens will be distributed via airdrop to identical wallet addresses on the Ethereum network.
This snapshot will encompass all wallets, staking delegations, validator compensation, smart contract states, and centralized exchange holdings. Token holders won’t be required to perform any manual steps to claim their new tokens.
Nevertheless, multisig safes, decentralized exchange liquidity pools, and various onchain applications won’t transfer in this migration. The team has strongly advised all users to withdraw from smart contracts prior to the September 10, 2026 deadline.
Token supply metrics and emission schedules will remain unchanged. Following the announcement, ONE was valued at $0.00073, reflecting a 3.86% decline over 24 hours.
Security Breach Behind the Strategic Shift This proposal emerges just weeks after a devastating security compromise. A malicious actor exploited a vulnerability in Harmony’s cross-shard receipt verification mechanism, enabling duplicate processing of legitimate receipts.
LATEST: 🚨 Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to Aug. 11, reversing over 109,000 transactions and 315 staking transactions, days after an exploit minted ~4 billion ONE tokens. pic.twitter.com/I0wEcGVrTX
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) August 18, 2026
Leveraging this security flaw, the attacker generated over 3 trillion unauthorized ONE tokens through six separate transactions. To mitigate damage, Harmony executed a network rollback to an August 11 state, eliminating more than 109,000 standard transactions alongside 315 staking operations.
Notably, this wasn’t Harmony’s inaugural major security incident. In June 2022, malicious actors extracted approximately $100 million from the project’s Horizon cross-chain bridge infrastructure. Federal authorities subsequently linked that breach to North Korean cybercriminal organizations Lazarus Group and APT38.
Following August’s exploitation, the team indicated they were evaluating token migration as a potential response. Sunday’s proposal solidifies that strategic direction.
Options for Network Validators Current validators face three pathways forward: discontinue node operations, transition into governance roles, or participate in Harmony’s emerging AI video platform.
The project has allocated a $1.37 million compensation fund for validators who deactivate their nodes by the September 10 deadline, preserve their staked assets, and commit to governance participation.
This proposal carries no binding obligations. According to Harmony’s governance framework, approval demands 51% total stake participation and 66.7% affirmative votes following a 21-day deliberation period.
Harmony’s future strategy centers on an AI-powered video “remix economy,” enabling content creators to share open-source prompts while AI systems generate derivative video content from user contributions. The project estimates this advertising-supported model could yield tens of millions in revenue from a million-user base.
Harmony announced plans to fully shut down its network and migrate its native token ONE to Ethereum, citing excessive threats from state-sponsored attackers and AI agents. Per the proposal, validators may cease operating nodes starting at 7 AM Pacific Time on September 10, 2026. The project will pivot its focus to the "AI video secondary creation economy": it plans to open prompts and materials for creators and fans to produce secondary works, with AI agents expanding content branches into more stories. For the migration, a snapshot will be taken at the network’s final block, and new ONE tokens will be airdropped to corresponding Ethereum wallet addresses (no active claim required). Delegated staking and unclaimed rewards will be transferred to each governor’s treasury. Multisig wallets, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated; Harmony urges users to exit all smart contracts by September 10, 2026. Regarding the AI video business, Harmony is recruiting operators responsible for video generation, media distribution, and content moderation. In the first year, the platform will subsidize hardware costs and boost video generation demand. Operators must stake tokens to qualify, earn rewards based on service uptime, and cover other operational costs. The platform will also track and incentivize contributions to original works, secondary creations, and promotion. Harmony will provide a total one-time compensation of $1.372 million to validators and their delegates who shut down nodes on time, sign relevant agreements, retain staking, and continue participating in governance, with the compensation disbursed over four quarters. The total supply and issuance rate of ONE will remain unchanged; future token issuance will be allocated to the AI video project, with related arrangements to be made after soliciting feedback from governors.
PANews, September 6 – Harmony has released two proposals to fully shut down its mainnet, which has been online since 2019, migrate its native token ONE to Ethereum, and pivot to an AI video "mashup economy" business. The team stated that threats from state-level attackers and AI agents are the reasons behind the plan to shut down the network.
The migration plan proposes to take a snapshot of tokens in user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchange accounts at the final block of the network, and airdrop new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, with no active claim required by holders. Delegated staking and unclaimed rewards will be airdropped to respective governance treasuries. The total supply of ONE and its issuance rate will remain unchanged, with newly issued tokens intended for the new business, and will seek governance feedback. Multi-signature wallets, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated; the team urges users to exit all smart contracts by September 10, 2026, and plans to make the token contract, snapshot calculations, and airdrop scripts public for audit.
Validators can stop running nodes starting from 22:00 Beijing time on September 10, 2026. The team plans to compensate validators for the difference in issuance rewards between node shutdown and the final block of the network, and will establish a one-time compensation pool of $1.372 million, paid out over four quarters to validators and their delegators who shut down on time, sign agreements, retain their stake, and serve as governors for the new project.
The new business will open prompts and materials for users to create derivative works, with AI agents expanding video stories, and will recruit operators responsible for video generation, distribution, and content moderation. Harmony plans to subsidize GPU hardware in the first year and drive video generation demand; operators must stake tokens and receive rewards based on service uptime. The team aims to help operators generate up to $1 million in total revenue in the first year, subject to staking and uptime requirements. Promoters can initially earn a 30% ongoing commission from the $10 monthly subscriptions they refer. Both proposals are non-binding, and the plans may still be adjusted.
AI video business proposal: https://x.com/harmonyprotocol/status/2096604013940838667
Harmony announced in a post that it plans to fully shut down its Harmony network and migrate its native token ONE to Ethereum, citing excessive threats from state-sponsored attackers and AI agents. Per the proposal, validators may stop operating nodes starting at 7:00 AM Pacific Time on September 10, 2026, as the project shifts its development focus to the "AI video secondary creation economy". The migration plan will take a snapshot at the network’s final block, with new ONE tokens airdropped automatically to corresponding Ethereum wallet addresses—no action is required from holders. Delegated staking and unclaimed rewards will be airdropped to each governor’s treasury. Harmony noted that multi-signature wallets, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, urging users to exit all smart contracts before September 10. Relevant token contracts, snapshot calculations, and airdrop scripts will be made public for auditing. The project also plans to launch a one-time compensation program totaling $1.372 million, available to validators and their delegates who shut down nodes on schedule, sign the agreement, retain staked assets, and continue serving as governors, with payments distributed over four quarters. The total supply and issuance rate of ONE will stay unchanged; future minted tokens will be allocated to new AI video projects, subject to feedback from governors.
Harmony Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain known for its sharded architecture, has announced plans to reverse its network to a state preceding a significant security breach. The decision follows the discovery of an unauthorized minting event that created trillions of forged ONE tokens, the project’s native cryptocurrency.
Validators are preparing to discard subsequent blocks and restart from carefully selected checkpoints, a move that has intensified discussions about the fundamental principles of blockchain technology.
The incident came to light around August 12, 2026, when researchers identified irregular token creation. Initial reports pointed to roughly four billion improperly generated ONE tokens.
Deeper analysis later revealed a far larger scale: more than three trillion ONE tokens were forged through multiple transactions directed into a small number of attacker-controlled wallets.
In one rapid sequence lasting just over 100 seconds, a single wallet executed hundreds of transfers, successfully moving approximately 2.385 trillion ONE.
At pre-incident valuations, this represented a multi-billion-dollar inflation of supply.
Many of the illicit tokens quickly circulated through decentralized exchanges, liquidity pools, bridges, and other services, complicating any targeted recovery.
The vulnerability stemmed from flaws in cross-shard receipt handling and related verification processes.
These weaknesses allowed the attacker to generate tokens without corresponding debits elsewhere in the system.
Harmony responded swiftly by deploying an emergency software patch to halt further minting, pausing its cross-chain bridge, and coordinating with exchanges to freeze related addresses.
Independent security reviewers later confirmed the core findings of the forged mint and the associated fund flows.
After evaluating several recovery strategies, the team concluded that a full rollback offered the most equitable and secure path forward.
Alternatives such as selectively burning the forged tokens, blacklisting specific wallets, replaying only legitimate transactions, or migrating to an entirely new token were considered but rejected.
Because the illicit tokens had already mixed with legitimate holdings across numerous addresses and platforms, targeted interventions risked harming innocent users or leaving residual inconsistencies that could enable further attacks or consensus failures.
A uniform rollback applies a single rule across the entire network, cleanly removes the forged state, and minimizes the chance of ongoing technical problems.
Under the approved plan, Shard 0 will revert to block 92,730,034 and Shard 1 to block 94,978,278.
Both checkpoints share the same timestamp of 23:25:37 UTC on August 11, 2026—shortly before the first confirmed forged mint.
Validators will load reviewed replacement databases at these heights and begin producing new blocks immediately afterward.
The discarded window encompasses more than 141,000 consecutive blocks, including over 109,000 regular transactions and several hundred staking operations.
Legitimate activity that occurred after the chosen point will be erased from the accepted ledger history.
This approach has sparked debate within the broader cryptocurrency community.
Blockchain systems are frequently promoted on the basis of immutability: once transactions are confirmed through consensus, they should remain permanent.
A coordinated rollback challenges that ideal and raises questions about the degree of decentralization when a core development team and validators can effectively rewrite history.
Supporters of the decision argue that preserving the economic integrity of the token and protecting the wider user base outweighs rigid adherence to an unbroken chain in the face of such extreme dilution.
Critics counter that repeated interventions of this nature erode trust and set precedents that could be abused.
Harmony continues to work with exchanges, bridge operators, and law-enforcement agencies while urging validators to follow the official upgrade procedures.
The episode underscores ongoing tensions between practical security responses and the philosophical foundations of decentralized ledgers. As the network prepares to resume from the earlier state, market participants and observers will closely monitor both the technical execution and the longer-term implications for confidence in the protocol.
Harmony plans to roll its blockchain back to August 11 after an attacker created more than three trillion ONE tokens without authorization.
The rollback would erase the forged coins, but it will come at a cost, because transactions that are legitimate and that were completed after the chosen recovery point would also disappear.
This means exchanges, bridges, and users will have to retrace these transactions that happened during that period.
Harmony chooses rollback despite the disruption The team wants to return its two affected shards to their state at 23:25:37 UTC on August 11, which is seconds before the first confirmed unauthorized mints.
Harmony reviewed 141,628 blocks from the affected period on Shard 0 alone, and they contained 109,126 regular transactions and another 315 staking transactions. All of these would be erased under the plan, but the team looked at less disruptive alternatives, including destroying selected balances and blocking wallets.
But the unauthorized coins that were produced had already spread into exchanges, bridges, liquidity pools, and wallets containing other users’ funds. If the team tries to remove only the attacker’s coins, it could affect innocent users or leave some forged ones behind.
Harmony also said it cannot automatically recreate legitimate transactions. It said once the network returns to its former state, transactions might not produce the same results, as balances and other things might have changed.
Attack created more ONE than first reported Harmony’s investigation found that the attacker manipulated records of previously completed transfers between parts of the network, and this allowed old transactions to appear unused and be processed again.
The result of this was that new ONE coins were created without removing an equivalent amount elsewhere.
Harmony said about six forged transactions created about 3.01 trillion ONE across four wallets, which was higher than the four billion ONE that was reported earlier, which Harmony said represented only the first wave it identified.
One wallet later attempted 534 transfers in just 106 seconds, and 477 succeeded in the transfers, moving about 2.385 trillion ONE.
Harmony has not been able to recover the assets, but it has traced most of the movement to wallets or services.
ONE price remains under pressure ONE traded near $0.00072 on August 18, roughly 42% below its pre-incident level around $0.00125, with it briefly approaching $0.00060 during the heaviest selling.
Source: TradingView ONE was already trending lower before the attack. However, the latest fall accelerated as details of the unauthorized mint emerged and Harmony moved towards a rollback. Trading also increased when the price dropped, showing that the sell-off attracted more market activity.
Final Summary Harmony plans to erase approximately 3.01 trillion forged ONE by returning the network to its state before the attack. The rollback would also remove legitimate transactions completed after the recovery point, creating additional work for users and services.
Harmony has moved from considering a rollback to publishing the exact checkpoints it plans to use after an attacker forged trillions of ONE tokens. The recovery decision will discard legitimate post-checkpoint activity as well as the malicious state, making it one of the most disruptive options available to a live blockchain.
In an August 17 incident update, Harmony said validators will use replacement databases at shard 0 block 92,730,034 and shard 1 block 94,978,278. Both correspond to August 11 at 23:25:37 UTC.
Why Harmony Chose a Full Recovery State The first confirmed forged mint entered shard 0 at block 92,730,036. Harmony selected block 92,730,034 as a one-block safety buffer because the intervening block contained no regular or staking transactions, incoming receipts, or gas use and had the same state.
Shard 1 was not where the forged mint occurred, but the team included it as a precaution at the same timestamp. New blocks will begin at heights 92,730,035 and 94,978,279 after validators switch to the replacement databases.
Harmony said it considered targeted burns, wallet blacklists, token migration, selective transaction replay, and a simpler database rewind. It rejected those approaches because the forged ONE had moved through exchanges, decentralized exchange pools, contracts, bridges, staking positions, and shared wallets. Removing balances selectively could therefore damage unrelated users or leave inconsistent state behind.
The Trace Is Broad, Not the Same as Attribution One forged-mint wallet attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE in 106 seconds. Harmony said 477 transfers succeeded and moved 2.385 trillion ONE. Its later flow model reconciled almost all of the forged amount across service boundaries and transaction fees.
The team emphasized that tracing tokens to a wallet, pool, exchange, or service does not identify an individual and does not make the funds safely burnable. Shared balances can contain assets belonging to many unrelated users. Harmony said it is working with exchanges, bridges, law enforcement, and an independent security firm as the investigation continues.
Legitimate Transactions Will Also Be Lost The affected shard-0 archive contains 141,628 consecutive blocks and 109,126 regular transactions, plus 315 staking transactions. Harmony classified 95.8% of regular transactions as automated, but that still leaves real activity that cannot be restored safely.
Balances, nonces, pool reserves, approvals, swap deadlines, and staking state will change on the replacement chain. Replaying an old transaction could therefore produce a different result or cause a previously failed transaction to succeed.
The incident reinforces the operational risks behind cross-chain and decentralized-market infrastructure, already visible in the rapid growth of perpetual DEX activity. Harmony’s plan may remove the forged state, but execution now depends on validator coordination and on exchanges and bridges handling the discontinuity without crediting transactions from the discarded chain.
AUTHOR
A freelance writer with a passion for crypto, delivering insightful and accurate content on blockchain and fintech. With a knack for translating complex concepts into accessible content, Eric produces well-researched articles, blog posts, and thought leadership pieces that cover the latest trends and developments in the digital finance space. His writing is aimed at educating and engaging both newcomers and industry experts, offering fresh insights into the world of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and blockchain innovations. Eric’s dedication to quality and accuracy makes him a trusted voice in the fintech and crypto communities
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
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Harmony has proposed rolling back its blockchain to two Aug. 11 checkpoints, a recovery plan that would discard more than 109,000 regular transactions as the network removes ONE created through a forged mint.
Summary
Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to two checkpoints from Aug. 11 following a forged ONE mint. More than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions would be discarded under the recovery plan. One forged mint wallet moved 2.385 trillion ONE through 477 successful transfers in 106 seconds. Harmony said exchanges, bridges and law enforcement are assisting with the investigation. According to Harmony’s latest incident update on X, validators would retain shard 0 block 92,730,034 and shard 1 block 94,978,278, both recorded at 11:25:37 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11, before restarting the network from replacement databases built around those checkpoints.
Under the plan, new blocks would begin at heights 92,730,035 on shard 0 and 94,978,279 on shard 1. Harmony said client version v2026.1.2 has been configured to reject the abnormal block hashes linked to the incident, preventing validators from accepting the affected chain history after the restart.
The first confirmed forged mint reached shard 0 at block 92,730,036, according to the network. Block 92,730,035 contained no regular or staking transactions, incoming receipts or gas usage, while its state remained unchanged from block 92,730,034.
Harmony said it selected block 92,730,034 to provide a one-block safety buffer. The database, recovery scripts and validator procedures had also been prepared and reviewed around that block, while changing the checkpoint at a late stage could leave validators working from different recovery targets.
Shard 1 was not where the forged mint occurred. Harmony said its corresponding checkpoint was included as a precaution using the same timestamp.
Harmony rollback would use replacement databases The recovery plan would replace the affected shard databases instead of using Harmony’s existing in-place rewind function.
According to the team, the network’s –revert function mainly moves chain heads and does not fully clear later receipts, indexes, snapshots and cross-shard information. Leaving some of that data behind could preserve an attack route or cause validators to reach different states.
Harmony said a replacement database gives validators a single reviewed state from which to resume consensus.
The team also considered burning or repairing the forged ONE directly, but said the tokens had already passed through exchanges, decentralized exchange pools, contracts and numerous wallets. Removing assets at individual destinations could therefore affect funds belonging to unrelated users.
A blacklist was rejected because it would leave the forged supply in existence while potentially restricting wallets holding legitimate assets. Selectively replaying transactions was also ruled out because the state of the replacement chain would differ from the discarded chain, meaning identical transactions could produce different results.
Token migration was another option reviewed by Harmony, but the team said it would cause substantially more disruption.
The decision comes after another blockchain faced a similar choice following an exploit. In December 2025, Flow revised rollback plans following a $3.9 million execution-layer exploit, dropping an initial full rollback proposal in favor of targeted token burns after bridge operators and other participants raised concerns about the effect on legitimate activity. crypto.news reported at the time that Flow also planned a phased network restart and restrictions on flagged accounts.
More than 109,000 transactions face removal Harmony’s rollback would discard all blocks created after the selected checkpoints, including regular transactions made by users during the affected period.
To measure the impact, the team built a shard 0 archive covering blocks 92,730,035 through 92,871,662. The dataset contained 141,628 consecutive blocks, 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, with 109,441 exact transaction-to-receipt matches.
Harmony said it checked parent-hash continuity and receipt completeness throughout the archived range.
Automated activity accounted for most of the transaction count. Of the 109,126 regular transactions, 104,545, or 95.80%, were classified as automated. DEX automation represented 99,863 transactions, including 75,430 successful swaps and 11,804 failed bot attempts.
As a result, Harmony cautioned that the number of discarded transactions should not be treated as the number of affected users.
The team also examined whether some regular transactions could be safely restored after the rollback. Only 22 were simple native transfers without an obvious dependency in the available data, but Harmony said even those could not automatically be considered safe for replay.
Another 860 native transfers raised questions involving balances, funding sources, nonces or later spending. A further 80,630 transactions depended on contract or blockchain state, while 27,614 were failed transactions, incident-linked activity or movements involving exchanges, bridges and consolidation routes.
All 315 staking transactions also depend on chain and epoch state, according to the update.
Harmony said balances, nonces, token approvals, swap deadlines, liquidity pool reserves and staking conditions would change once the replacement chain starts. Under that altered state, a transaction that previously failed could succeed, while a swap, approval or staking transaction could generate a different outcome.
Full EVM traces are also unavailable through the RPC data used in the review, leaving internal contract transfers and storage changes subject to application-specific analysis.
Forged ONE moved through exchanges, pools and bridges The investigation has separately mapped the movement of the newly created ONE across the network.
According to Harmony, one wallet involved in the forged mint attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE each within 106 seconds. A total of 477 transfers succeeded, moving 2.385 trillion ONE.
Investigators created a time-ordered graph beginning with all wallets associated with the forged mints, separating transactions signed by those wallets from successful transfers, failed attempts and subsequent movements through other addresses.
The traced activity was checked against blocks, transaction receipts and balances through shard 0 block 92,805,850. Harmony said the funds reached standalone wallets, exchange accounts, DEX routers and pools, liquidity provider positions, bridge contracts, wrapped ONE, staking wallets and high-volume service wallets.
When forged ONE became mixed with other assets, the tracing model followed transfers chronologically and capped the amount attributed to the forged tokens at each wallet’s available balance. According to the team, the method was intended to prevent the same tokens from being counted repeatedly as they moved between addresses.
An earlier model traced more than 99.9% of the forged ONE to a wallet or service boundary, while a later version reconciled almost all of the amount across those boundaries and transaction fees at the selected cutoff.
Harmony stressed that route coverage does not mean investigators can identify the individuals controlling every destination. Exchange accounts, pools, contracts and other service clusters can contain funds belonging to many users.
The amount that can be safely destroyed is smaller still, according to the team. Forged tokens left untouched in a standalone wallet may be possible to isolate, while ONE that entered an exchange wallet, liquidity pool, bridge, staking position or another shared balance could no longer be removed in full without risking unrelated assets.
A comparable problem has surfaced in other token-minting attacks. In June, Humanity Protocol disclosed that compromised administrative keys allowed attackers to take control of bridge infrastructure and mint additional H tokens on BNB Smart Chain. The protocol halted affected bridge operations and coordinated with exchanges and law enforcement while investigators tracked the stolen assets.
Investigation continues alongside validator recovery Harmony said it has made initial progress toward tracing the hacker and is working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement to preserve records and continue the investigation.
An independent third-party security company also reviewed the incident separately and corroborated the forged mint and the main findings from the fund-flow analysis, according to the network.
Harmony has dealt with a major cross-chain security incident before. Its Horizon Bridge lost about $100 million in June 2022 after private keys controlling the bridge were compromised. The project subsequently worked with exchanges, law enforcement, and blockchain analytics firms to identify the attacker, while raising its hacker bounty to $10 million.
Funds from that attack continued moving months later. In January 2023, on-chain investigators tracked stolen ETH through hundreds of addresses, while Binance and Huobi froze accounts linked to the movement and recovered 124 BTC.
For the current incident, Harmony said it is working with exchanges and bridges to assess the effect of discarding post-checkpoint activity and determine how affected parties can be handled. The team said all blocks after the checkpoints would be removed under the proposed recovery, including regular transactions that were unrelated to the forged mint.
Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to Aug. 11 following an exploit that created forged ONE tokens, discarding more than 109,000 transactions confirmed after its chosen checkpoint.
The layer-1 network said Monday that validators would revert to blocks recorded at 11:25 pm UTC on Aug. 11. New blocks will be produced from the next heights using replacement databases.
The discarded window includes 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Harmony said selectively restoring transactions was unsafe because balances, contract states, nonces and other conditions would differ on the replacement chain.
Harmony was considering a rollback last week after reports that unauthorized ONE had been minted and sent to exchanges.
It said Monday that investigators had traced nearly all of the forged ONE to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement. At last look, the token had a market cap of roughly $10.8 million, according to Coingecko data.
Harmony’s plan puts it alongside Ravencoin among networks seeking to reverse already confirmed blockchain activity after an exploit.
Ravencoin faced a potential three-day blockchain reorganization after a consensus flaw was exploited. Mining pools controlling most of Ravencoin’s hash rate began building a competing chain that could reverse previously confirmed transactions.
Ravencoin recent price of $0.002819 showed a market cap of $46.3 million.
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to Aug. 11 following an exploit that created forged ONE tokens, discarding more than 109,000 transactions confirmed after its chosen checkpoint.
The layer-1 network said Monday that validators would revert to blocks recorded at 11:25 pm UTC on Aug. 11. New blocks will be produced from the next heights using replacement databases.
The discarded window includes 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Harmony said selectively restoring transactions was unsafe because balances, contract states, nonces and other conditions would differ on the replacement chain.
Harmony was considering a rollback last week after reports that unauthorized ONE had been minted and sent to exchanges.
It said Monday that investigators had traced nearly all of the forged ONE to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement. At last look, the token had a market cap of roughly $10.8 million, according to Coingecko data.
Harmony’s plan puts it alongside Ravencoin among networks seeking to reverse already confirmed blockchain activity after an exploit.
Ravencoin faced a potential three-day blockchain reorganization after a consensus flaw was exploited. Mining pools controlling most of Ravencoin’s hash rate began building a competing chain that could reverse previously confirmed transactions.
Ravencoin recent price of $0.002819 showed a market cap of $46.3 million.
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Due to a security incident involving Harmony (ONE) that has caused spot price anomalies across multiple exchanges, Binance Futures will activate the latest Price Protection (LPP) mechanism for the ONE USDT U-margined perpetual contract at 20:00 on August 14. User assets remain unaffected. The mark price will be calculated based on the average trading price over the past 10 seconds and transition smoothly, with a maximum per-second fluctuation of ±1%. The upper and lower limits of the funding rate have been simultaneously narrowed from ±2.000% to ±0.005%. Once the ONE spot price converges across multiple exchanges, the LPP period will conclude and standard mark price calculations will resume. A separate announcement will be issued for this adjustment.
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Harmony, the Layer-1 blockchain protocol, is weighing the potential rollback of its network after an attacker exploited a vulnerability and minted nearly 4 billion ONE tokens, representing about 26% of the coin’s total supply.
On August 11, Harmony’s development team stated that it was working closely with cryptocurrency exchanges to identify, freeze, and block funds associated with the incident. The priority is to prevent further movement of the unauthorized tokens and to mitigate the fallout for existing holders.
Developers are crafting a patch to address the underlying vulnerability and are exploring the viability of restoring the blockchain to its state before the exploit. Harmony has not yet commented on the technical specifics, the total number of illicitly created tokens, or how many have already been transferred to exchanges.
The team’s announcement followed a detailed analysis posted by the X account Juiceberg, which suggested that attackers managed to mint unauthorized ONE tokens by exploiting empty blocks within the network.
According to Juiceberg, approximately 2.8 billion of the newly minted ONE were moved to exchanges soon after the incident, as the token’s price began to plummet.
Estimates from the same source indicate that the attacker may still control 115 million ONE on-chain, equating to roughly 2.9% of the exploit’s total haul. The remaining tokens could already have been sold or lodged within exchange deposit wallets.
These figures are yet to be independently verified, and Harmony has not provided a full breakdown of the affected supply or published a detailed post-mortem of the incident.
Mini dictionary: Harmony, a Layer-1 blockchain protocol, offers fast and scalable infrastructure for decentralized applications, focusing on low-latency and low-fee consensus.
Token price impact and dilution fearsThe exploit triggered significant selling pressure on ONE, causing the token’s price to fall more than 50% at its lowest point. As of the latest update, ONE remains down roughly 33.6% over the past 24 hours.
MetricBefore ExploitAfter ExploitONE total supply~15.1 billion~19.1 billionONE circulating price drop–Down 33.6%The steep decline reflects the market’s uncertainty over a substantial and sudden increase in circulating supply, as well as concerns about potential intervention by network administrators and the precedent it could set for blockchain governance.
If billions of unauthorized tokens remain on the open market, the resulting dilution could continue to pressure ONE’s price. A possible rollback, meanwhile, raises questions about integrity, decentralization, and the permanence of blockchain transactions.
Previous attacks and outlookThe incident unfolds a little over two years after the high-profile Horizon Bridge hack in June 2022, which resulted in roughly $100 million in digital asset losses. That earlier attack was attributed by the FBI to the Lazarus Group, a cybercrime organization linked to North Korea.
This latest breach underlines continued security challenges for Harmony, following its prior experience as one of the most heavily impacted networks in the bridge exploit wave affecting several blockchains.
Harmony’s team is currently working with exchanges to restrict movement of the newly created tokens while they finalize a patch. Rollback scenarios are under evaluation, though the developers have not reached a decision.
Any proposal to reverse the blockchain state would likely require broad support from Harmony’s validators and the wider community to go forward.
Harmony is assessing whether billions of unauthorized ONE tokens, minted through a vulnerability, can be purged by rolling the network back. No final decision has been made and the outcome may depend on community consensus.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
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Harmony confirmed on August 12 a flaw that allowed the creation of 4 billion ONE without authorization. At current rates, this represents about 3.2 million dollars. The token lost 34% in 24 hours. The amount is not huge on the scale of crypto hacks. The problem is more serious: someone reportedly managed to directly increase the supply of ONE.
In Brief Harmony confirms the unauthorized creation of 4 billion ONE. About 97% of the tokens have already left the attacker’s address. The technical cause of the flaw has not yet been made public. Harmony discovers 4 billion ONE outside the accounts The alert came from Juiceberg on X. Harmony then confirmed the incident. A bad memory for the network: its Horizon bridge had already lost nearly 100 million dollars in 2022.
This time, no bridge emptied nor compromised wallet, at least according to available information. The attacker reportedly exploited empty blocks to create 4 billion ONE.
Another curiosity, and not a minor one: totalSupply did not immediately account for these new tokens. The supply displayed by some tools no longer matched the one actually circulating.
Harmony has not yet published a full technical explanation. The team is preparing a fix, working with several exchanges to block the funds, and considering a rollback. This last option would involve reverting the blockchain to a previous state.
The ONE crypto now costs around 0.0008 dollars after a 34% drop in one day. The 4 billion tokens created represent about 3.2 million dollars.
This is little compared to the 100 million lost on Horizon. But the comparison is misleading. Here, the issue is not so much the sum but the very possibility of creating ONE outside of the planned rules.
The ONE are already on their way to exchanges According to Juiceberg, only about 115 million ONE remain on the attacker’s address. This represents 2.9% of the 4 billion created. The rest would have already been sold or sent to deposit addresses belonging to centralized platforms.
The margin for maneuver is therefore narrow. Harmony can still attempt to freeze what remains identifiable. For the rest, everything will depend on the cooperation of exchanges and the ability to track the movements. This kind of chase is nothing new in crypto. Funds move from one address to another, then look for an exit door. In 2026, Ethereum and Solana were already among the main targets of crypto hackers.
Harmony has one particularity. The incident does not seem limited to a third-party application. It is the network’s native token that is at the heart of the flaw.
How is not yet known.
Software bug, privilege abuse, consensus problem, or other internal mechanism: Harmony has not published enough elements to decide. This is probably more important at this stage than knowing how many dollars can be recovered.
Four years after Horizon, trust returns to the debate In June 2022, the Horizon bridge lost nearly 100 million dollars after the compromise of its multisignature system. The FBI then attributed the attack to Lazarus Group and APT38, linked to North Korea.
Nothing today links the new flaw to these groups.
But ONE holders have memory. Four years after Horizon, Harmony must again explain why an operation impossible on paper could occur on its network.
A rollback can erase transactions. It does not erase questions.
Harmony will have to publish the exact cause, explain why totalSupply did not follow immediately, and above all demonstrate that the method used can no longer work.
The crypto sector has become much less patient with projects that accumulate incidents. More than 100 crypto projects have already shut down in 2026, sometimes after a succession of technical or financial problems. Harmony recognized the flaw quickly. It is a start. But the real issue now comes down to a simple question: if 4 billion ONE could be created once, what prevents it from happening again?
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Lydie M.
Enseignante et ingénieure IT, Lydie découvre le Bitcoin en 2022 et plonge dans l’univers des cryptomonnaies. Elle vulgarise des sujets complexes, décrypte les enjeux du Web3 et défend une vision d’un futur numérique ouvert, inclusif et décentralisé.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
Harmony’s ONE token plunged roughly 40% on Wednesday after an attacker exploited the Layer 1 blockchain to mint approximately 4 billion new tokens, equivalent to more than a quarter of the existing supply.
Onchain analyst Juiceberg first identified the unauthorized mint, estimating that roughly 2.8 billion ONE had been transferred to exchanges. The analyst later estimated that around 97% of the newly created tokens had either reached exchange deposit wallets or already been sold, leaving approximately 115 million ONE available to sell onchain.
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Harmony said it was working with exchanges to freeze funds linked to the exploit and identified four wallet addresses associated with the incident. The network also said it was evaluating rollback options.
Harmony later paused its bridge and released an emergency software update for validators that it said would prevent additional unauthorized minting. The project said a separate update would be required to address the tokens already created.
Harmony has not yet disclosed the vulnerability behind the exploit or provided its own confirmed figure for the amount of ONE created or transferred to exchanges. Its reported circulating supply before the incident stood at roughly 15 billion tokens, making the approximately 4 billion unauthorized tokens equal to about 26% of that amount.
A rollback would restore the blockchain to a state before the exploit, potentially removing the unauthorized tokens that remain on the network. It would also reverse legitimate transactions processed after the selected rollback point.
Harmony previously suffered a major security breach in June 2022, when attackers stole approximately $100 million from its Horizon bridge. The FBI later attributed that attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Developers behind the Harmony blockchain protocol have officially acknowledged a significant security breach that allowed the unauthorized generation of a large volume of additional ONE tokens, the network’s native digital asset.
The confirmation comes after on-chain observers first highlighted unusual activity involving the sudden appearance of roughly four billion new tokens.
According to reports circulating on social media platforms earlier, an unidentified party succeeded in minting approximately four billion ONE tokens without proper authorization.
We are working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds.
We are working on a patch and rollback options.
Will update when we have new information. https://t.co/XB0nCwTAyN
— Harmony 💙 (@harmonyprotocol) August 12, 2026
This quantity represents a substantial expansion of the existing circulating supply—estimated previously at around 15 billion tokens—amounting to an increase of roughly one-quarter.
Industry professionals have now generally noted that the process appeared to leverage empty blocks in a manner that bypassed standard verification checks, and that the network’s total supply reporting mechanism did not immediately register the expansion.
Following the minting, a large portion of the newly created tokens—reported at around 2.8 billion—was rapidly moved toward cryptocurrency exchanges.
This transfer coincided with a sharp decline in the price of ONE, which dropped by approximately 26 to 34 percent within a short period, trading near $0.0008 at one point.
Analysts indicated that the remaining balance held by the responsible party on the chain itself stood at roughly 115 million ONE, or about 2.9 percent of the total minted amount, while the vast majority had already reached exchange deposit addresses or been sold.
In a public statement, the Harmony team confirmed the incident and outlined its immediate response.
Officials stated they are collaborating with their internal staff and relevant trading platforms to halt further movement of the affected funds and to freeze associated assets.
The team is actively developing a software patch intended to block any additional unauthorized minting and is simultaneously evaluating the possibility of a network rollback.
Such a measure would involve reverting the blockchain to a state prior to the exploit, potentially neutralizing the impact of the illicitly created tokens that remain on the network.
Harmony has also paused its cross-chain bridge service as a precautionary step and issued an urgent call for validators to upgrade to a newly released software version designed to prevent further minting.
The project indicated that additional updates would follow once more details become available, noting that a full technical investigation into the root cause remains ongoing.
This event marks another security challenge for the layer-1 network, which previously experienced a major incident in 2022 when its Horizon bridge suffered a substantial loss of assets valued near $100 million.
A separate issue in late 2023 involving staking logic also led to the unintended creation of tens of millions of extra ONE tokens before an emergency fix was applied.
Market reaction has been swift, with the token’s value reflecting the sudden increase in supply and the uncertainty surrounding recovery efforts.
The Harmony team continues to monitor the situation and has requested exchanges to take action against specific wallet addresses linked to the activity. As the investigation proceeds, the focus remains on containing the impact, restoring confidence among users and validators, and implementing lasting safeguards against similar vulnerabilities.
Harmony is considering rolling back its blockchain after claims that an attacker exploited the network to mint nearly 4 billion ONE tokens, equivalent to about 26% of the token’s supply.
On Tuesday, Harmony said it was working with exchanges to stop and freeze funds. The layer-1 blockchain said it was preparing a patch and evaluating rollback options. It did not confirm the cause, the number of tokens created or the amount sent to exchanges.
Cointelegraph contacted Harmony for comment but had not received a response by publication.
Harmony’s post was in response to an X account called “Juiceberg,” which claimed the unauthorized ONE tokens were minted through empty blocks and that approximately 2.8 billion tokens were quickly funneled to exchanges as ONE’s price fell.
Juiceberg estimated the attacker had about 115 million ONE remaining onchain, or 2.9% of the amount allegedly minted, with the remainder either sold or held in exchange deposit wallets. Cointelegraph could not independently verify the claims.
At the time of writing, CoinGecko showed ONE fell 33.9% over the past 24 hours.
The incident follows Harmony’s June 2022 Horizon Bridge hack, which led to the theft of about $100 million in cryptocurrency. The FBI later attributed the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
Harmony (ONE) fell to an all-time low of $0.0005735 during early Asian trading on Wednesday after a reported exploit minted roughly 4 billion tokens without authorization.
The minted amount equals about 26% of ONE’s total supply. Harmony said it is coordinating with exchanges to freeze funds while it develops a patch and evaluates rollback options.
Harmony Exploit and the Price CollapseOn-chain analyst Juiceberg reported that the supply was minted through empty blocks. Around 2.8 billion of those tokens moved quickly to exchanges, according to the analysis.
The sell pressure sent ONE tumbling. The token traded near $0.00087 at press time, down about 29% on the day, after touching its record low earlier in the session.
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Harmony (ONE) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto MarketsHarmony later named four wallet addresses tied to the incident. The team asked all exchanges to block and freeze funds traced to them:
one1uap8dx2z0qsjxqthm5flgcxkeepsz3gsrghnfn (0xe7427699427821230177dd13f460d6ce43014510) one17u300a40ll5wphd8kj5hktryhdjq3ml9f4phy4 (0xf722f7f6afffe8e0dda7b4a97b2c64bb6408efe5) one1a5hur07z5vtvzhr35zkw8tfqedemkz8t88xgd7 (0xed2fc1bfc2a316c15c71a0ace3ad20cb73bb08eb) one1h56hkxmua0uzfv07fu04cudvtrl35u96pq47vy (0xbd357b1b7cebf824b1fe4f1f5c71ac58ff1a70ba) “We are working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds. We are working on a patch and rollback options. Will update when we have new information,” the post read.
The event marks the network’s second major security breach. In 2022, its Horizon Bridge lost roughly $99.6 million in an attack linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
Harmony has not disclosed the root cause of the incident yet. BeInCrypto has reached out to Harmony for comment.
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Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Harmony issued a statement announcing that it has suspended its cross-chain bridge service due to today’s security incident, and ordered all validators to immediately upgrade to the latest patch. The patch can prevent further unauthorized token minting, the project said, with additional updates to follow to address the tokens that have already been minted. In addition, Harmony has requested all cryptocurrency exchanges to block and freeze funds linked to four relevant wallet addresses. Earlier reports confirmed that Harmony suffered another security breach today. On-chain analysis shows the project was likely hit by an empty block vulnerability attack, with the attacker minting around 4 billion ONE tokens without authorization—equaling roughly 26% of the current total supply. About 2.8 billion of these tokens were subsequently transferred to exchanges, triggering notable selling pressure on the market. As a result, ONE’s price was cut in half intraday.
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Harmony has asked exchanges to freeze funds linked to four wallets as it investigates the unauthorized minting of ONE tokens.
An attacker has hit the Layer 1 blockchain Harmony and minted at least 4 billion of its native ONE token.
Data from CoinGecko shows the token plummeted to a new all-time low of $0.0005735 following the incident.
Hackers Mint 4 Billion ONE X user Juiceberg was among the first to raise the alarm, posting on August 12 that an unknown person had minted 4 billion ONE tokens, which is about 26% of its supply, and moved about 2.8 billion of them into exchanges.
“The attacker has roughly 115M ONE left to sell onchain — about 2.9% of the ~4B they minted,” the on-chain analyst wrote. “(~97%) is already on exchanges and has either been sold or is sitting in deposit wallets ready to sell.”
Soon after, the protocol acknowledged the incident, although it did not disclose the root cause or confirm the amount that had been minted by the hacker. It also informed users that it was working with several exchanges in an attempt to freeze the funds. The team also said they were working on a patch to fix the issue as well as rollback options, promising to give an update as soon as they got new information.
Harmony has so far traced the theft to four wallet addresses, one1uap…43014510, one17u300a…6408efe5, one1a5hur07z…73bb08eb, and one1h56hkx…58ff1a70ba, and has asked all exchanges to “block and freeze” any funds that track back to them. Due to the incident, the team has also paused the LayerZero-Harmony bridge and asked validators to upgrade with a patch that prevents any further minting of ONE.
“We’ll follow up with another update to address already minted tokens,” the team promised.
This is not the first time Harmony has been attacked, as it lost about $100 million in 2022, when its Horizon Bridge was exploited.
ONE Dumps to All-Time Low Following the incident, the ONE token, which had been trading around $0.00117, dropped suddenly to about $0.00057 to register a new all-time low. At the time of writing, the token had shaken off some of the shock and was changing hands 33% above that ATL, although the new level still represented a nearly 40% loss in 24 hours. Over seven days, the asset is 32% in the red per CoinGecko data and more than 28% on the monthly chart.
You may also like: Attacker Drains 200K XRP From Bridge Using Fake Deposit Coldcard Exploit Tops $100M as Expert Says Stolen BTC May Be Hard to Spend Coldcard Wallet Attacks Enter Fourth Wave, Putting 449 BTC at Risk The attack happened right after another one that hit the XRPL-Coreum bridge, with nearly 200,000 XRP stolen in that incident where the hacker tricked the bridge’s deposit-checking system into treating a wallet-to-wallet transfer as an actual deposit.
Harmony Protocol’s native ONE token crashed 40% on Wednesday after the Layer-1 blockchain confirmed an exploit. The attacker minted 4 billion ONE tokens without authorization, with almost all transferred to crypto exchanges for sale.
Harmony Protocol Suffers Unauthorized 4 Billion Crypto Mint On-chain analyst Juiceberg first reported that an attacker minted 4 billion ONE tokens through empty blocks. A total of 2.8 billion tokens were quickly funneled to crypto exchanges, with 97% of the tokens either sold or held in deposit wallets to sell.
Harmony Protocol confirmed the exploit hours later, but details about the exact technical root cause were not revealed. “We are working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds,” it said.
Harmony Protocol shared four specific wallet addresses, including Harmony ONE and corresponding Ethereum addresses linked to the exploit. It has asked crypto exchanges to block and freeze related funds.
The protocol also paused the bridge to prevent cross-chain transfers. Notably, the cross-chain bridge was closed as Harmony Protocol suffered a $100 million exploit in 2022. ONE token price has failed to surpass the lowest level since then.
In the latest update, the protocol has asked all validators to upgrade to a released patch. “This patch prevents any further minting. We’ll follow up with another update to address the already minted tokens,” the protocol added.
Validators and Explorer/RPC nodes: upgrade now.https://t.co/oij0pKpkve
— Harmony 💙 (@harmonyprotocol) July 8, 2026
ONE Token Crashes 40% ONE token price tumbled 40% in the past 24 hours, with the price currently trading at $0.000759. The price crashed from a 24-hour high of $0.00124 to a low of $0.000535.
Furthermore, trading volume has increased by over 4000%, indicating investors moved to sell their holdings amid a massive rise in ONE token supply due to Harmony Protocol exploit.
ONE Token Price Crash. Source: X CoinGlass data showed massive selling in the derivatives market. At the time of writing, the total ONE token futures open interest tumbled 5% to $9 million in the last 4 hours.
ONE futures OI on Binance and OKX slumped more than 28% and 18%, respectively. This signals bearish sentiment among derivatives traders.
To avoid trading on platforms exposed to liquidity crises caused by massive exploits, investors should select partners from a list of the compare beginner crypto exchanges that prioritize security and user asset protection.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
