Harmony Proposes Shutting Down Its Layer 1 and Moving ONE to Ethereum

Harmony has proposed retiring the layer-1 blockchain it started seven years ago and reissuing ONE as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Balances would be recorded at the network's final block and airdropped to the same addresses, with total supply and the emission rate left as they are. Validators may begin shutting down nodes from 10 September, and holders have until that date to get out of smart contracts. The proposal is non-binding, and no date has been set for the last block. It comes four weeks after an exploit forged a large share of the token's supply.

What survives the snapshot

The snapshot is meant to capture ONE held in wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and exchange balances. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards go into individual governor vaults. Multisig safes and liquidity pools do not make the trip, and neither do on-chain applications, so anything parked in them has to be unwound by hand before the chain stops. Harmony says it will coordinate with centralized exchanges so their listings point at the Ethereum version instead.

Paying validators to switch the lights off

A pool of $1.372 million is set aside for validators and delegators who shut down on schedule, sign an agreement, keep their stake and take a governor role. The Block rounds that to $1.37 million. Payment runs over four quarters and covers the gap in emission rewards between a validator's own final block and the network's. Passage needs validators representing 51% of total stake weight to take part and 66.7% of them to agree, after a seven-day introduction and a fourteen-day vote. Nothing in the weekend announcement started that clock. The Block noted the plan went out on X with no formal governance procedure attached to it.

The count from August still does not add up

The exploit behind all this surfaced on 12 August, when a flaw in cross-shard receipt verification let valid receipts be processed more than once. Cointelegraph and coin-turk both put the forged amount near 4 billion ONE, around 26% of supply. crypto.news says over 3 trillion ONE across six transactions. Those two are nowhere near each other and no outlet reconciles them, though CoinGecko's circulating supply of 14.87 billion ONE fits the first and cannot fit the second. Harmony's answer in August was to roll two shards back to 11 August checkpoints, cutting 109,126 ordinary transactions out of the record. This desk reported that plan as a rollback of 141,628 blocks, which counts blocks and not transactions. The two are different measures of the same repair.

From a chain to a video subscription

What Harmony proposes to become next is not a blockchain. The plan describes an AI video "remix economy" in which small groups of creators publish prompts and assets, other people fork them into further clips through AI agents, and operators handle generation, distribution and moderation. crypto.news reports a $10 monthly subscription, 30% referral commissions and operator revenue of up to $1 million a year. The Block adds a projection of tens of millions of dollars in advertising from a million users, a figure that appears in one account and describes a forecast rather than a result. Validators are offered a choice: stay on as governors, or become operators or affiliates in the new venture.

ONE traded at $0.0007586 on Monday for a market value near $11.28 million, and its all-time low of $0.0005735 was set on the day the exploit surfaced. The chain's record of incidents runs further back than August. Roughly $100 million left the Horizon bridge in June 2022, and a staking flaw minted 146.28 million ONE across 74 delegator addresses in December 2023 before an emergency hard fork closed it. The desk's account of the August mint traced the whole forgery to 106 seconds of block time. Until validators actually vote, the date the chain stops is the one number nobody has.