Harmony has proposed shutting down its Layer 1 blockchain entirely, taking a final snapshot of ONE balances and airdropping matching ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, with future emissions redirected to an AI video venture.
The project announced the plan in a post on X on Sunday, Sept. 6. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony wrote. “Since our mainnet launch in 2019, our community has been resilient through attacks and changes, but it is time to fully sunset the Harmony network.”
How the migration would work
Holders would not need to claim anything. Harmony would snapshot balances at the network’s final block, covering wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchange listings, then airdrop new ERC-20 ONE tokens to the same addresses on Ethereum. The project said it would publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public review.
Not everything moves. “Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and onchain apps cannot be migrated; users are urged to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026,” Harmony said in its announcement. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would be airdropped to individual governor vaults.
Validators can begin shutting down nodes from 7 a.m. Pacific on Sept. 10. A $1.372 million pool, equal to the network’s total validator rewards for the year before the August exploit, goes to those that shut down on time, sign an agreement, retain their stake and take governance roles. Validators can also choose to simply stop their nodes or join the new venture.
Emissions redirected to an AI video business
ONE’s total supply and emission rate stay unchanged, but future emissions would fund The Remix Economy, a proposed subscription service where creators publish prompts and assets that people and AI agents reuse to generate video clips. “We will bootstrap this economy with creators and operators who make AI videos,” the announcement said.
Non-binding, and the timing is awkward
The proposal is explicitly non-binding and says all plans are subject to change. Harmony has not said whether the shutdown would go through validator-led governance, which would require 51% of total stake weight to participate and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction and a 14-day vote.
The announcement lands less than four weeks after an Aug. 11 exploit of a cross-shard receipt verification flaw let an attacker mint unauthorized ONE. Harmony initially reported nearly 4 billion minted tokens, about 26% of supply, on Aug. 12; its own later reconstruction put the figure above 3 trillion across six transactions. The project then rolled the chain back to an Aug. 11 checkpoint, erasing 109,126 regular and 315 staking transactions. The sunset notice did not name the exploit, or the 2022 Horizon bridge theft of nearly $100 million that the FBI attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group and APT38, as reasons.
ONE traded near $0.00073 on Monday, Sept. 7, down roughly 4% in 24 hours, with a market value near $11 million, far from the roughly 38-cent peak of October 2021, when the network held more than $1 billion in user deposits, $747 million of it in DeFi Kingdoms.
