Harmony Ditches Independent Blockchain After Massive Rollback Fails

Harmony's blockchain is facing another major setback after proposing to shut down its independent network and move to Ethereum. This decision comes less than three weeks after the project rolled back its chain to prevent a massive attack that exploited cross-shard receipts. The rollback, which occurred on August 21, discarded over 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive.

The attack, which took place on August 11, allowed attackers to mint tokens without corresponding debits elsewhere. Harmony initially reported that 4 billion ONE were created in the attack, but later revised this figure to approximately 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions.

This is not the first major attack Harmony's blockchain has suffered. In June 2022, its Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in an attack attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group.