Harmony is proposing to shut down the blockchain it controversially restored through a rollback less than three weeks ago.
The Sept. 6 plan would end Harmony’s independent network, move ONE to Ethereum, and preserve the token through a snapshot and airdrop, reversing the project’s position from Aug. 17, when it rejected migration as too disruptive.
Instead, Harmony chose to roll back the chain after an Aug. 11 exploit that allowed attackers to reuse cross-shard receipts and mint tokens without corresponding debits elsewhere.
The project initially reported 4 billion ONE created in the attack. Its broader reconstruction later put unauthorized issuance at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions.
Harmony completed the rollback on Aug. 21, discarding more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive, and said the network was operating normally.
This represents the second major attack the blockchain network has suffered in recent years.
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.
The exploit marked a major setback for the network and was followed by a prolonged decline in ONE, which eventually traded about 99% below its peak. Data from CryptoSlate showed ONE trading at $0.0007122 as of press time, with a market value near $10.75 million.
As a result of these attacks, the network now wants to retire its services altogether.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony said in the new proposal.
The migration Harmony rejected is back on the table
Under the new proposal, Harmony would take a snapshot at the chain’s final block and distribute new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.
Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would move into individual governor vaults, while token supply and emissions would remain unchanged.
However, the blockchain itself cannot move.
Smart contracts, liquidity pools, and multisig safes will not migrate automatically, prompting Harmony to urge users to exit smart contracts before Sept. 10. Validators may also begin shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time that day.
A proposed $1.37 million compensation pool would pay governors and delegators over four quarters, subject to shutdown and service conditions.
The plan would also repurpose future ONE emissions toward Harmony’s AI-video initiative, further separating the token’s future from the chain it was originally designed to secure.
That leaves the rollback looking less like a permanent recovery and more like a temporary bridge to shutdown.
Harmony spent August rejecting migration, rewriting chain history and restoring operations to preserve the network. By September, it was proposing the migration it had set aside and preparing to abandon the infrastructure anyway.
The proposal remains non-binding, and Harmony has not yet disclosed the final block or airdrop date.