Harmony network developers have proposed shutting down the seven-year-old blockchain and migrating its ONE token to Ethereum. The stated reason is the growing cost and complexity of protecting the network from increasingly sophisticated attackers.
"Threats from state-level actors and artificial intelligence agents are too great. Since the mainnet launch in 2019, our community has shown resilience against attacks and changes, but the time has come to fully decommission the Harmony network," reads the proposal published on X. For now, this is only a proposal and carries no binding legal force. The document explicitly states that all plans are subject to change. It also does not clarify whether the network shutdown will go through a standard governance process involving validators and stake-based voting.
Harmony was once considered a competitor to Ethereum and other fast blockchains. In October 2021, the ONE token reached approximately $0.38, and by January 2022, more than $1 billion in user funds had been deposited into the network. The game DeFi Kingdoms alone accounted for $747 million. However, in June 2022, the Horizon bridge was hacked for nearly $100 million. The FBI later linked the attack to North Korean hacker groups Lazarus Group and APT38. Against this backdrop, the price of ONE fell nearly 99% from its all-time high.
A more recent incident occurred on August 11. An attacker exploited a vulnerability in cross-shard transaction verification and created more than three trillion unauthorized ONE tokens across six transactions. Harmony made the controversial decision to roll back the blockchain to its pre-theft state, permanently erasing more than 109,000 transactions from history. According to the new proposal, Harmony will take a final snapshot of ONE balances and issue corresponding ERC-20 tokens to the same wallet addresses on the Ethereum network. The snapshot will include coins held in wallets, staking, validator rewards, and on centralized exchanges. Users will not need to claim the new tokens themselves. Harmony promises to publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot-based calculations, and airdrop scripts for public review.
The most unusual part of the plan is the future use of ONE. Originally, the token was created to reward validators for network security. Now, according to Harmony's vision, future tokens will be directed toward funding an "AI-powered video remix economy."