Harmony Proposes Abrupt Shutdown, Migrates ONE Token to Ethereum

Harmony, a seven-year-old layer-1 blockchain network, has proposed shutting down its entire operation and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20. This decision comes in the wake of a major exploit on August 12 that allowed an attacker to mint roughly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, about 26% of the network's supply.

The proposal, which is non-binding but has set a working deadline, requires validators to begin powering down their nodes starting September 10. Users must exit smart contracts and liquidity pools by then since none of this can migrate. Harmony plans to take a final snapshot of ONE balances across user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, and centralized exchanges and issue matching ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum.

The network's stated reason for this drastic decision is the increasing threat posed by state actors and AI agents that are finding exploits much faster than before. This follows Harmony's own numbers which show the network's market cap sits near $10.6 million, with ONE trading at roughly $0.0007.