Harmony, a Layer 1 blockchain that was once seen as a competitor to Ethereum, is planning to end the operation of its independent chain, which has been running for 7 years.
Harmony has recently proposed a plan to fully shut down the Harmony Layer 1 network launched in 2019, and to migrate the native token ONE to Ethereum. Going forward, the project’s focus will shift to video and audio built around generative AI, the "Remix Economy".
Harmony said that security threats from nation-state attackers and AI agents have been growing. After years of attacks and network changes, the team believes it is time to "fully terminate the Harmony network." However, it should be noted that the current proposal is still non-binding; the final block production timing, complete governance process, and some migration details may still be adjusted.
ONE will be converted into an Ethereum token
Under the migration mechanism currently proposed, Harmony plans to take a snapshot at the network’s last block. This will cover ONE held in regular wallet balances, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and ONE held by centralized exchanges.
After that, the project will issue a new ONE on Ethereum and conduct an airdrop to the same Ethereum addresses. According to Harmony, in principle, ordinary ONE holders, delegators, and validators do not need to claim on their own. The total supply of ONE and the original minting rate are planned to remain unchanged, while any newly issued ONE in the future will be redistributed to new AI video business activities.
But not all on-chain assets can be migrated seamlessly. Harmony specifically warned that multisignature wallets, liquidity pools, and the on-chain applications themselves cannot be directly transferred, and it urged relevant users to exit smart contracts before September 10. The team also pledged to publicly release the new ONE token contract, the snapshot calculation method, and the airdrop scripts so the community can audit.
Validators can stop node operations as early as September 10
Harmony has also started setting up exit mechanisms for existing validators.
Under the proposal, validators can stop node operations as early as 7:00 AM Pacific Time on September 10, which is 10:00 PM the same day in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The project team also established a one-time compensation pool of about $1.372 million. It will provide compensation to validators and delegators who stop their nodes on time, sign the relevant agreements, continue holding their staked positions, and transition to the new project’s “governor.” The funds are expected to be distributed in four quarters.
This also means Harmony may not plan to completely dissolve the existing community. Instead, it hopes to convert the validators that originally maintained blockchain consensus into governance participants, video computation nodes, or promoters in the new AI video ecosystem.
Turning from blockchain to an “AI video remix compilation economy”
The new direction proposed by Harmony is called “Remix Economy for AI Video.”
The overall concept is that a set of content creators publish prompts, role assets, and video assets that can be used publicly. Users can then “fork” or create derivative works based on the original content. After that, AI agents generate large amounts of short-form video content from different story branches.
The project also plans to recruit operators at the same time, responsible for AI video generation, content distribution, and moderation. These operators need to stake ONE and earn rewards based on conditions such as service running time.
Harmony says that in the first year it plans to subsidize the related GPU hardware costs, and hopes to help operators collectively generate up to $1 million in revenue. Promoters, meanwhile, may earn a 30% ongoing commission from the $10 monthly subscription fee paid by users they recommend.
The team even estimated that if the platform could ultimately attract 1 million users, the advertising business could generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. However, these revenue figures are currently only Harmony’s proposed business model or targets, not realized earnings.
August vulnerability became a turning point
Harmony’s sudden proposal to shut down its L1 is closely related to recent security incidents.
In August this year, a major vulnerability occurred on the Harmony network. The attacker exploited a cross-shard receipt verification flaw, allowing already-used valid receipts to be processed repeatedly—thereby minting ONE without corresponding asset deductions.
Early on-chain data once showed that an attacker minted about 4 billion ONE. After Harmony later reconstructed the incident timeline, it found that the unauthorized token amount involved—originating from six transactions on exchanges—actually exceeded 3 trillion tokens. Harmony ultimately chose to roll back the network to the state before the vulnerability occurred. This decision involved giving up about 109,126 ordinary transactions and 315 staking transactions.
Security issues have also not been the first to trouble Harmony.
In June 2022, its Horizon cross-chain bridge was attacked, resulting in the loss of about $100 million in crypto assets. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later confirmed in 2023 that the attack was carried out by the Lazarus Group and APT38, which are supported by North Korea. Therefore, Harmony’s mention of “state-level attackers” in this statement also has substantial historical context, not just an abstract description of network security risks.
ONE is down nearly 99.8% from its all-time high
Harmony was once a star project in the previous wave of public blockchain hype.
CoinGecko data shows that ONE hit an all-time high of about $0.379 on October 26, 2021. However, as of September 7, ONE is only about $0.000738, down roughly 99.8% from its all-time high.
ONE currently has a circulating supply of about 14.87 billion tokens. Its market cap is only about $11 million, and its 24-hour trading volume is about $1.41 million. On CoinGecko, its ranking has fallen to outside the top 1,100.
The prolonged weakness in price also highlights that Harmony’s ecosystem has shrunk significantly compared with the peak of the previous bull market. Even after announcing it might give up its own L1 and shift to AI video, the ONE price has not shown any significant positive reaction so far.
From an “Ethereum killer” to being dependent on Ethereum
Harmony launched its mainnet in 2019. In its early days, it positioned itself around sharding technology, high throughput, and low transaction costs, aiming to become an independent Layer 1 capable of supporting Ethereum applications at scale.
The project has even continued working on Ethereum-compatible updates, Stream Sync, and shortening block times in the first half of 2026. It only launched the v2026.0.0 mainnet version in March this year, and in April it was still preparing a large hard fork.
But within just a few months, the direction shifted from continuously improving the L1 to considering a complete halt of the mainnet—moving ONE to Ethereum.
If the relevant proposal is ultimately implemented, Harmony will become another crypto project that abandons its independent consensus layer and instead leverages the infrastructure of established public chains. Likewise, ONE will transition from a native Layer 1 gas and staking token into an application token on Ethereum.
The bigger issue is whether AI video can create real, practical demand for ONE.
Based on the current plan, Harmony intends to transform the tokenomics originally used to pay validators and maintain blockchain security into staking, rewards, and governance mechanisms for AI video operators. This is a completely different business model.
So, rather than being a typical product upgrade, this pivot by Harmony is more like a “restart”: abandoning a Layer 1 that it has operated for seven years, keeping ONE and the existing community, and then trying to use Ethereum as the underlying infrastructure—betting on whether generative AI video can rebuild the project’s usage demand and revenue sources.
"Harmony plans to shut down the L1 network! ONE will move to Ethereum; the project will transform into AI video"—This article was first published on (BlockBeats).