Developers of the Harmony network have proposed shutting down the seven year-old blockchain and moving its $ONE token to Ethereum, saying the cost and difficulty of defending the network against increasingly capable attackers has become too great.
"The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great," the project wrote on X on Sunday. "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."
Retiring a blockchain is an unusual move. Chains that fail normally lose users and developers until nothing is left running on them, rather than announcing a closure and a migration plan.
The proposal is explicitly non-binding and carries a disclaimer saying all plans are subject to change.
Harmony has not said whether the shutdown will go to a governance process the network uses for other decisions, in which elected validators — a term for entities that maintain a network using their computing resources — submit proposals and voting power is weighted by stake.
A one-time Ethereum rival
Harmony drew serious money at its peak, drawing interest for its extremely fast and cheap network that was pegged as competitor for Ethereum and other upstarts, such as Solana. Native token $ONE reached about 38 cents in October 2021, and by January 2022 the network held more than a billion dollars of user deposits, with the game DeFi Kingdoms alone accounting for $747 million of it.
But troubles sprouted in the previous bull market after Harmony's Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in June 2022, an attack the FBI later attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group and APT38. That led to a steep decline in how the token and network were perceived in the crypto community — with $ONE prices falling as much as 99% from peak in the months following.
More recently on Aug. 11, an attacker exploited a flaw in the way the network verified transactions moving between its shards, or the parallel sections the chain is split into.
The attacker minted more than three trillion unauthorized $ONE across six transactions. Harmony rolled the chain back to a point before the theft in a controversial move, removing more than 109,000 transactions permanently from the network’s history.
What happens now
Under the new proposal, Harmony would take a final snapshot of $ONE balances and issue matching ERC-20 tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would include $ONE held in wallets, staking, validator rewards and centralized exchanges.
Holders would not need to claim the new tokens themselves. Harmony said it would publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public review.
But that creates the strangest part of the proposal. $ONE was originally issued in part to reward validators for securing Harmony's blockchain. If the chain disappears, those future tokens would instead fund what Harmony calls the "Remix Economy for AI Video."