Harmony, the Layer 1 that once sold itself as a faster, cheaper Ethereum, has proposed shutting its own blockchain down. Under the plan, validators start powering off on September 10 and every ONE balance moves to Ethereum as an ERC-20 token. The reason the developers gave is blunt. Defending the chain against attackers, they said, is no longer worth what it costs.
Validators go dark on September 10
This is a wind-down, not a sale or a merger. At 7 a.m. Pacific on September 10, elected validators begin switching off their nodes, and users have until then to pull assets out of smart contracts. Harmony would take a final snapshot and issue matching ONE on Ethereum to the same wallet addresses, so holders do not have to claim anything. Wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards and exchange balances all carry across.
Two things do not. Multisig safes and liquidity pool positions have to be unwound by hand before the lights go out, or they strand. The team also set aside $1.372 million, about a year of validator rewards at the pre-exploit rate, to pay operators who stop on schedule and take a role in whatever comes next.
Why a network decides it cannot defend itself
The proposal states the rationale plainly. State actors and AI agents now pose threats too large to hold off, the team wrote, and keeping pace no longer made financial sense for a chain this size. Harmony has the scars to justify it. In June 2022 its Horizon bridge lost close to $100 million to an attack the FBI tied to North Korea's Lazarus Group, one of the three billion dollars since drained from cross-chain bridges. In August an attacker then found a flaw in how Harmony verified cross-shard receipts and minted an enormous run of fresh ONE across six transactions.
We first reported that mint at an estimated four billion tokens. A later review put the real figure above three trillion, with roughly 2.8 billion reaching exchanges before the team could react. Harmony rolled the chain back to an August 11 checkpoint, erasing 109,126 ordinary transactions and 315 staking ones. Rewriting settled history to undo a hack is the sort of move that tells a validator set the security model is spent. The same kind of adversary keeps working, too: stolen keys and one state-linked crew drove much of 2026's stolen funds.
The market had priced most of this in. ONE trades near $0.0007, and Harmony's market value sits around $10.6 million against a peak of $0.379 in October 2021, a drop of about 99.8 percent. At the start of 2022 more than a billion dollars was locked in Harmony's applications, the game DeFi Kingdoms holding $747 million of it. What remains is a rounding error next to that.
ONE's next job is an AI video app
The destination is where the proposal turns odd. Future ONE emissions would fund what Harmony calls a Remix Economy for AI Video, a subscription service where people publish prompts and assets for others, and for AI agents, to fork into short clips, with revenue coming from advertising. A network walking away from the field partly because of AI attackers wants its token to bankroll an AI product. None of it is locked in. The proposal is non-binding, and it needs 51 percent of staked ONE to take part and 66.7 percent to vote yes before anything happens. That vote, and the September 10 deadline right behind it, are what holders have to track over the next few days.