Harmony to Close Blockchain and Migrate ONE Token to Ethereum

Harmony on Sept. 6 proposed shutting down its seven-year-old blockchain and migrating the ONE token to the Ethereum mainnet through a final-block snapshot and an airdrop. The proposal urged users to withdraw funds from smart contracts before Sept. 10 and said validators may begin shutting down at 7 a.m. Pacific Time that day.

Under the non-binding plan, Harmony would record token balances at a final block and recreate those balances on Ethereum by issuing new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be moved into individual governor vaults. The proposal states that token supply and emissions would remain unchanged after migration.

The proposal makes clear that smart contracts, liquidity pools and multisignature safes on the Harmony chain will not transfer automatically. Developers and token holders would need to migrate contracts and move assets manually before validators shut down services.

A $1.37 million compensation pool for governors and delegators is included in the plan. The pool would be paid over four quarters and would be subject to the timing of shutdown and service conditions. The proposal also reallocates future ONE emissions to an AI-video project, separating token issuance from the chain infrastructure the token originally secured.

The migration proposal follows a chain of security incidents. On Aug. 11 attackers reused cross-shard receipts to mint tokens without corresponding debits; initial reports cited roughly 4 billion ONE created, and a later reconstruction attributed about 3.01 trillion unauthorized ONE to six forged transactions. Harmony completed a rollback on Aug. 21 that removed more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive. In June 2022, the Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in an attack attributed by U.S. authorities to the Lazarus Group.

“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the proposal states, citing security concerns as part of the rationale for ending the network’s independent operations.

The proposal does not set a firm date for the final block or the airdrop. It is non-binding, leaving holders to decide whether to remain on the Harmony chain for a potential snapshot or to withdraw assets now. At the time the proposal was posted, ONE traded near $0.0007122, with a market value around $10.75 million.

If implemented, the plan would end Harmony’s independent network and reestablish token balances on Ethereum while preserving the token’s supply and emission schedule on the new chain.