I’m looking at Harmony’s latest move, and to me, this is no longer just a blockchain migration story. It looks more like a decision to stop defending an independent network that has become increasingly difficult to justify.
Harmony is now proposing to shut down its own blockchain and move ONE to Ethereum, despite rejecting the same idea only weeks earlier. The plan would take a snapshot at the final block and distribute new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, while keeping the token’s supply and emissions unchanged.
The timing is important. Harmony recently rolled back its chain after an August exploit involving cross-shard receipts allowed attackers to create tokens without matching debits elsewhere. The project initially estimated around 4 billion ONE had been created, but its later reconstruction put the unauthorized issuance at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six transactions.
Harmony completed the rollback on Aug. 21, but the recovery came with a major cost. More than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard archive were discarded.
And this wasn’t Harmony’s first major security crisis. In 2022, its Horizon bridge lost nearly $100 million in an attack later attributed by the FBI to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. ONE never fully recovered from the damage, eventually falling around 99% from its peak.
Now Harmony is essentially saying that continuing to operate its own chain is no longer worth the risk.
The most striking part of the proposal is Harmony’s explanation: “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great.”
That statement tells me this is bigger than a simple technical migration. Harmony appears to be changing its entire risk model. Instead of spending resources protecting and maintaining an independent blockchain, it wants Ethereum to become the infrastructure underneath ONE.
But the migration has limitations. The blockchain itself cannot simply be moved to Ethereum. Smart contracts, liquidity pools and multisig safes will not automatically transfer. Harmony is therefore urging users to exit smart contracts before Sept. 10, while validators may begin shutting down the same day.
The proposal also includes a $1.37 million compensation pool for governors and delegators, paid over four quarters under certain conditions. Future ONE emissions could also be redirected toward Harmony’s AI-video initiative rather than being used primarily to support the blockchain.
That makes the recent rollback look very different in hindsight. What initially appeared to be a serious attempt to restore Harmony may have been only a temporary step before the network was eventually retired.
My takeaway is simple: Harmony isn’t just moving ONE to Ethereum. It is abandoning the idea that ONE needs its own blockchain to survive. The token may continue, but the network that gave it its original purpose could soon disappear.