Harmony proposes permanent shutdown of its blockchain and migration of ONE to Ethereum

Harmony, a seven‑year‑old blockchain, has submitted a proposal to shut down its own network and migrate its native token, ONE, to Ethereum. The plan follows a recent rollback that was carried out after a large exploit.

Background of the recent exploit

On Aug. 11, attackers exploited a cross‑shard receipt vulnerability, minting tokens without corresponding debits. Initial reports indicated 4 billion ONE were created, but later analysis showed roughly 3.01 trillion ONE were forged across six transactions. Harmony rolled back the chain on Aug. 21, discarding over 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard‑0 archive.

Previous security incidents

Harmony has suffered major attacks before, including a June 2022 breach of its Horizon bridge that resulted in a loss of nearly $100 million, later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The series of attacks contributed to a steep decline in ONE’s price, which was trading around $0.0007122, giving the token a market value of about $10.75 million at the time of reporting.

Details of the shutdown proposal

• Take a snapshot at the final block and airdrop equivalent ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.
• Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be moved into individual governor vaults.
• Token supply and emissions would remain unchanged, but future emissions would be redirected to Harmony’s AI‑video initiative.
• Smart contracts, liquidity pools and multisig wallets will not migrate automatically; users are urged to withdraw from contracts by Sept. 10.
• Validators may begin shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Sept. 10.
• A $1.37 million compensation pool is proposed to pay governors and delegators over four quarters, contingent on shutdown conditions.

Implications

The proposal marks a reversal of Harmony’s earlier stance on migration, which was rejected on Aug. 17 as too disruptive. While the plan is non‑binding and final block or airdrop dates have not been disclosed, it signals a move to retire the Harmony network and preserve the ONE token on Ethereum.