Harmony is proposing to shut down its independent blockchain and migrate the ONE token to Ethereum through a final-block snapshot and airdrop, according to an announcement on September 6. Under the plan, Harmony would capture wallet balances at the chain’s final block and distribute equivalent ONE tokens to those same addresses on Ethereum, then cease network operations.
The proposal follows two major security incidents. In June 2022, Harmony’s Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in an attack the FBI later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. More recently, on August 11, an exploit allowed attackers to reuse cross-shard receipts and mint tokens without corresponding debits. Harmony initially reported 4 billion ONE created in the attack; broader reconstruction put unauthorized issuance at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions.
Harmony completed a rollback on August 21, discarding more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from shard-0. The network has now moved toward permanent shutdown rather than recovery. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony stated in announcing the plan.
Migration Details
Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would move into individual governor vaults on Ethereum. Token supply and emissions would remain unchanged. Smart contracts, liquidity pools, and multisig safes will not migrate automatically, meaning users holding assets in those systems would need to manage recovery separately.
Harmony proposed a $1.37 million compensation pool to pay governors and delegators over four quarters. The pool carries unspecified service conditions. Future ONE emissions would be repurposed toward Harmony’s AI-video initiative.
Timeline
Users have until September 10 to exit smart contracts. Validators may begin shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time on that date.
The proposal represents a reversal from August 17, when Harmony rejected migration as too disruptive. ONE has declined 99 percent below its peak and traded at $0.0007122 as of press time, valuing the total supply at $10.75 million.
