Harmony plans to roll its blockchain back to an Aug. 11 checkpoint after an attacker forged roughly 3 trillion ONE tokens, a step the team said would wipe out more than 109,000 transactions confirmed since the exploit.
Validators will revert to blocks recorded at 11:25 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11 and pick up from there using replacement databases, Harmony said in an Aug. 17 statement. The window slated for erasure spans 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, per Cointelegraph. The attacker minted unauthorized ONE tokens and shifted them to exchanges, The Block reported.
Put plainly, every transfer, stake, and contract interaction settled on Harmony between the attack and the rollback point would be treated as though it never took place.
Harmony said it considered a token burn and blacklisting the exploiter’s wallets before choosing a rollback, which it called the “fairest and most secure” option, according to The Block. Selectively restoring individual transactions was taken off the table. The team said doing so would leave balances, contract states, nonces, and other chain conditions inconsistent on the replacement chain.
That is where the old immutability debate sits. A rollback favors restitution for holders damaged by the forged tokens over the finality blockchains are supposed to guarantee in principle. Users whose legitimate transfers fall inside the 109,000-transaction window would watch their confirmed activity get voided right alongside the attacker’s.
By Monday, Harmony said investigators had traced nearly all of the forged ONE to wallets or service boundaries and were coordinating with exchanges, bridges, and law enforcement, Cointelegraph reported. The token’s market capitalization stood at roughly $10.8 million, based on CoinGecko data cited in the same report.
Neither source has detailed how the forged tokens were minted. The rollback itself was described in the reporting as planned but not yet carried out.
The decision comes as a separate rollback dispute unfolds on Ravencoin. Mining pools that control most of Ravencoin’s hash rate started building a competing chain after a consensus flaw was exploited, a move that could reverse previously confirmed transactions through a three-day reorganization, Cointelegraph reported. Ravencoin traded near $0.002819 with a market cap of about $46.3 million.
Two projects, two exploits, the same blunt remedy on the table. Traders, as ever, disagree on whether finality is a property or a preference.
Harmony did not name a target date for executing the rollback in the material reviewed.
