Harmony announced Sunday that it plans to retire its Layer 1 blockchain and migrate its native ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20 asset, citing persistent security threats from state actors and AI agents. The proposal would take a final network snapshot, record ONE held in wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchange accounts, and then airdrop replacement ONE tokens to the same addresses on Ethereum without requiring users to file claims.
Validators can begin shutting down nodes from Sept. 10, 2026, and Harmony has set aside $1.372 million to compensate eligible validators and delegators who stop on time, sign an agreement, retain their stakes and transition to 'governors.' Users have been asked to exit multisig safes, liquidity pools and onchain applications before Sept. 10. The total token supply and emission rate would remain unchanged, though future emissions would support Harmony's proposed AI video 'remix economy,' in which creators publish prompts and assets, fans fork or remix them, and AI agents produce additional clips.
The shutdown proposal follows an August exploit in which an attacker exploited a cross-shard receipt verification flaw to mint more than 3 trillion ONE tokens across six transactions. Harmony rolled back shard 0 by 141,628 blocks, removing 109,126 regular transactions. ONE was trading around $0.00073 after falling 3.86% in 24 hours. The project has previously suffered the June 2022 Horizon bridge hack, which stole nearly $100 million and was attributed by the FBI to North Korean groups Lazarus and APT38, as well as a December 2023 staking bug that minted 146.28 million ONE.
