Harmony has proposed shutting down the network it launched in 2019 and moving its ONE token to Ethereum. Holders whose tokens sit in liquidity pools, multisig safes, or onchain applications have three days to get them out.
Wallet balances, staking delegations, validator rewards and exchange holdings will be captured automatically at the final block, with no claim required. Everything else will not, and the team has urged users to exit all smart contracts before September 10.
Harmony said that it proposes migrating its native token to Ethereum and fully sunsetting the Harmony network, describing the threats posed by state actors and AI agents as too great to continue.
What Migrates Automatically and What Does Not
Under the proposal, all tokens held in user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts or centralized exchanges will be snapshotted at the final block. New ONE tokens will be airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, with no action or claim required from holders, delegators or validators. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be airdropped to individual governor vaults.
The exception is the part that requires action. Harmony states that multisig safes, liquidity pools and onchain applications cannot be migrated, and urges users to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026. The announcement does not describe any remedy for assets left in those positions after the cutoff.
Harmony says it will publish the ERC-20 token contract, the governor vault contract, the snapshot calculations and the airdrop scripts for public audit. Total supply and the emission rate would remain unchanged.
The Validator Timeline
Any validator may cease operating from Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time. Harmony says it will compensate validators for the difference in emission rewards between each node’s last block and the network’s final block.
Validators who sunset their nodes on time, sign an agreement, keep their stakes and serve as governors would receive compensation paid in four quarterly instalments. The pool for that one-time programme totals $1.372 million, which Harmony says equals the network-wide rewards issued during the one-year period preceding the August 11 incident.
Validators are urged to retain their community and delegated tokens through the transition.
The Reason Given
The stated rationale is unusual for a chain shutdown. Harmony points to threats from state actors and AI agents rather than to funding, usage or token price, and says that while the community has been resilient through attacks and changes since mainnet launch in 2019, it is time to fully sunset the network.
The reference to the August 11 incident anchors that to a specific event. An attacker exploited a flaw in Harmony’s cross-shard receipt verification, allowing already-used receipts to be processed again and minting ONE without any matching debit. A separate quorum-verification issue meant a zero BLS signature could pass verification under certain conditions.
The Crypto Times reported the exploit on August 12, when on-chain analyst Juiceberg posted that roughly 4 billion ONE had been minted, about 26% of circulating supply, with 2.8 billion moved to centralized exchanges as the price fell. SlowMist logged the realized loss at approximately $3.2 million based on what the attacker extracted before liquidity dried up.
Harmony subsequently rolled the chain back to blocks recorded at 23:25:37 UTC on August 11, erasing 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions.
The Pivot to AI Video
Tokens issued through emissions would be reallocated to a new initiative Harmony calls The Remix Economy for AI Video, subject to governor feedback.
The proposal invites validators to join that effort as AI video operators or affiliates. In the first year, Harmony says it will subsidise operators on their GPU hardware and help them generate up to $1 million in combined revenue, subject to staking and uptime requirements. Affiliates would receive a recurring 30% commission on each $10 monthly subscription purchased through their referral.
Harmony states that the proposal is for informational purposes only and is non-binding, that all plans are subject to change, that additional terms may apply, and that nothing in it constitutes financial advice or a guarantee of token value.
The network’s difficulties predate this year. Its Horizon bridge was exploited for roughly $100 million in June 2022, an incident later linked to North Korean actors, after which the team offered a $10 million bounty that produced no recovery.
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