The Harmony blockchain is weighing a move to Ethereum after concluding that maintaining its standalone network is no longer worthwhile.
Harmony is proposing to shut down the blockchain it controversially restored through a rollback less than three weeks ago.
The Sept. 6 plan would bring Harmony’s independent network to an end, shift ONE to Ethereum, and preserve the token through a snapshot and airdrop, reversing the project’s stance from Aug. 17, when it rejected the migration as too disruptive.
Instead, Harmony opted to roll back the chain following an Aug. 11 exploit that let attackers reuse cross-shard receipts and mint tokens without matching debits elsewhere.
The project first reported that 4 billion ONE had been created in the attack. A later reconstruction put the unauthorized issuance at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions.
Harmony completed the rollback on Aug. 21, removing more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive, while saying the network was operating normally.
The incident marks the second major attack the blockchain network has faced in recent years.
In June 2022, Harmony’s Horizon bridge lost nearly $100 million in a major attack that the FBI later linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
The exploit dealt a heavy blow to the network and triggered a prolonged slide in ONE, which eventually fell roughly 99% below its peak. CryptoSlate data showed ONE trading at $0.0007122 at press time, giving the token a market value of about $10.75 million.
Following the attacks, the network is now moving toward retiring its services entirely.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony said in the new proposal.
The Migration Harmony Once Rejected Is Back on the Table
Under the new proposal, Harmony would take a snapshot of the chain at its final block, after which new ONE tokens would be distributed to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.
Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be transferred to individual governor vaults, while the token supply and emission rates would stay unchanged.
However, the blockchain itself remains unable to move.
Smart contracts, liquidity pools, and multisig safes will not migrate automatically, so Harmony is urging users to withdraw from these contracts before Sept. 10. Validators may also start shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time that day.
A proposed $1.37 million compensation pool would provide payments to governors and delegators over four quarters, with payouts tied to shutdown and service conditions.
The plan would also redirect future ONE emissions to Harmony’s AI-video initiative, further distancing the token’s future from the blockchain it was originally built to support.
That makes the rollback look less like a lasting recovery and more like a temporary step toward shutting the network down.
Harmony spent August rejecting migration, rewriting the chain’s history and restoring operations in an effort to keep the network alive. By September, it was proposing the migration it had previously dismissed while preparing to abandon the infrastructure anyway.
The proposal is still non-binding, and Harmony has yet to reveal the final block or set a date for the airdrop.
