Harmony, the Ethereum-compatible layer-1 blockchain behind the ONE token, has proposed shutting down its native chain and moving token issuance to Ethereum. The proposal, published on Sunday, comes roughly seven years after Harmony’s mainnet launch and only weeks after a major exploit led the team to plan a rollback that would remove more than 109,000 transactions.
The transition plan centers on a final network snapshot. Harmony would record the full state of the chain at its final block, including wallet balances, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contract positions and balances held by centralized exchanges. Once the snapshot is taken, new ERC-20 ONE tokens would be minted on Ethereum and distributed to the same addresses that held ONE on Harmony. There would be no claims process; token holders would not need to submit personal information or connect wallets to a migration tool.
Harmony said the proposal is non-binding. It did not specify when the final block would be produced, and it did not say whether the shutdown would be submitted to validator-led governance. That distinction matters because validators control how the network is governed. Under Harmony’s published rules, elected validators can create proposals, while unelected validators may vote, with voting power based on total stake. Passage requires participation from at least 51% of total stake weight and support from 66.7% of votes. The voting timeline includes a seven-day introduction period and a 14-day vote. If the community chooses to move forward, the current proposal would need to clear those thresholds before the chain can be formally retired.
What validators are being asked to do
Validator operators would be offered three broad choices. They could stop their nodes and help close the network, continue serving in a governance capacity, or pivot to Harmony’s new AI-video initiative. The proposal sets aside a pool of $1.372 million to compensate validators that stop on time, retain their stake and agree to act as governors. By tying compensation to an orderly exit, the proposal appears intended to avoid a scenario in which validators disappear before users have a chance to exit.
Harmony separately warned that not all onchain positions can be migrated. Multisig safes, liquidity pools and applications built on Harmony cannot simply be moved to another chain. Anyone holding funds inside these structures must exit them before Sept. 10. Validators may begin shutting down as soon as that date, though the proposal does not define an exact final block time.
Fallout from forged ONE supply
The migration proposal comes less than four weeks after Harmony was forced to confront a serious security problem. On Aug. 12, Harmony said it was considering a rollback after reports that an attacker had minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, an amount equivalent to roughly 26% of total supply. An outside account claimed that about 2.8 billion unauthorized tokens had reached exchanges, but Harmony had not confirmed that figure at the time.
On Aug. 17, Harmony said it planned to revert the blockchain to an Aug. 11 checkpoint. That rollback would erase 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, removing transactions that took place after the exploit was detected. Harmony said investigators had traced nearly all forged tokens to wallets or service boundaries and were working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement.
A rollback of that size would have been a dramatic step, because it would rewrite part of the ledger and discard user activity that occurred after the checkpoint. By shifting from rollback to migration, Harmony is now proposing an even more significant change: the original chain would no longer be the permanent home for the ONE token.
Seven years from mainnet to possible exit
Harmony launched its mainnet during
Source: Cointelegraph News