Harmony wants to shut its layer-1 blockchain down. The native ONE token would move to Ethereum as an ERC-20. The proposal went up on X on Sunday, less than four weeks after an exploit forced a rollback that discarded more than 109,000 transactions. For a network that went live in 2019 and twice absorbed major attacks, it is a near-total capitulation.
Under the plan, Harmony said it would take a final-network snapshot covering wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchange balances. It would then issue ERC-20 ONE tokens on Ethereum and airdrop them to the same addresses. Holders, delegators, and validators would not need to act, according to Cointelegraph and The Block. Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain applications cannot be migrated. Harmony urged users to exit all smart contracts before Sept. 10, 2026, and said validators could begin shutting down nodes that day.
The network set aside roughly $1.37 million to compensate validators who stop their nodes on time, retain their stakes, sign an agreement, and transition to “governors” in a new initiative. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be airdropped to individual governor vaults, and the token’s total supply and emission rate would remain unchanged.
That new initiative is an AI-video “remix economy.” Harmony said it would help validators move into roles in a system where a small group of AI video creators publish open prompts and assets, fans fork the originals, and AI agents turn each fork into many more clips. “We will bootstrap this economy with creators and operators who make AI videos,” Harmony wrote. The network projected that advertising could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users.
Harmony described the sunset proposal as non-binding. It did not specify when the final block would be produced or whether the shutdown would be submitted to its validator-led governance process. Under Harmony’s published governance rules, elected validators create proposals, unelected validators vote, and passage requires 51% of total stake weight to participate with 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction and a 14-day vote.
The proposal follows an Aug. 12 exploit. Harmony said then that it was considering a rollback after reports an attacker minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE, roughly 26% of supply, Cointelegraph reported. A later Harmony reconstruction put the number higher. The attacker, it said, minted more than 3 trillion ONE across six transactions, The Block reported. The figures differ. The root cause, per The Block, was a flaw in Harmony’s cross-shard receipt verification that let valid receipts be processed multiple times. In practice, exploiters could mint new ONE without a debit elsewhere.
On Aug. 17 Harmony said it planned to revert the chain to an Aug. 11 checkpoint, discarding 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Investigators had traced nearly all forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and were coordinating with exchanges, bridges, and law enforcement, the network said. How much of the forged supply actually reached exchanges is not confirmed. An outside account claimed roughly 2.8 billion tokens hit exchanges, a figure Harmony had not verified at the time.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony wrote of the sunset. “Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes — but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network.”
The network’s prior incident was a June 2022 exploit of its Horizon cross-chain bridge for roughly $100 million in Ethereum and stablecoins. The FBI later attributed that attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group and APT 38. ONE traded at $0.00073, down 3.86% over 24 hours, The Block reported.
