Harmony said on Aug. 12 that it was working with cryptocurrency exchanges to stop and freeze funds after a suspected security incident on its Layer 1 network. The team said it is developing a patch and evaluating rollback options, but did not confirm the root cause or provide a public timetable.
On-chain analyst Juiceberg reported an unauthorized mint of roughly 4 billion ONE tokens through empty network blocks. In a follow-up, Harmony said investigations identified approximately 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens across 409 wallets and 10,288 anomalous transactions. Based on previously reported circulating supply of about 15 billion ONE, that would equal roughly 26–27% of supply, though Harmony has not independently confirmed all circulating-supply implications.
Juiceberg estimated about 2.8 billion ONE were quickly routed to centralized exchanges and later said roughly 115 million remained available to sell onchain. Harmony said it contacted centralized exchanges, identified four groups of wallet addresses, and asked platforms to block suspicious fund movements. The team also said about 53% of validators had applied a software patch preventing unauthorized token issuance.
“We are working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds. We are working on a patch and rollback options. Will update when we have new information,” Harmony wrote.
ONE sold off sharply as reports circulated. Depending on the data source, the token lost about 26% to 40% over 24 hours, trading near $0.000747 to $0.00083, with volume above $36 million and market capitalization near $13.7 million. Harmony has faced token creation issues before: a December 2023 staking logic flaw minted 146.28 million ONE and required an emergency hard fork at block 51,118,080. The network also suffered the Horizon Bridge exploit in June 2022, when about $100 million was drained and later attributed by the FBI to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The latest probe leaves open questions about whether exchanges can freeze reported deposits, the exact flaw, and whether Harmony will pursue a rollback.
