Harmony to Migrate to Ethereum (ETH) After Exploit Minted 3 Trillion ONE

Harmony Bets on Ethereum

Harmony Protocol will wind down its own blockchain and move to Ethereum mainnet, a decision the 2019-launched project announced to users on Sunday through an official statement on X. In that post, the team argued that threats from state actors and AI agents have grown too large for a small independent chain to withstand. The announcement caps a punishing stretch. On August 11, an exploit enabled the unauthorized minting of 3 trillion ONE tokens, and the team later executed a rollback that restored the chain to its pre-hack state. ONE sold off sharply in the immediate aftermath and has shed more than 40% of its value over the past month. The damage is also historical: a $100 million hack of the Horizon bridge in 2022 made Harmony one of that year’s most damaging bridge failures, and total value locked on the network — above $1 billion at its early-2022 peak — now sits at roughly $150,000, per on-chain data. For ONE holders, the practical effect is that balances survive, but the chain beneath them changes identity — from a proof-of-stake network running its own validator set to addresses inside Ethereum’s far larger security pool.

The migration itself will run from a snapshot, with user balances delivered to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. Tokens locked inside a smart contract cannot be moved across, and those holders have been given only three days’ notice to withdraw. In parallel, Harmony is pivoting to what it calls “the remix economy for AI video,” a venture that eyes advertising revenue of “tens of millions of dollars” from a million users. Existing validators are being nudged into new roles as “governors, AI video operators or affiliates,” a signal that the team expects the old validator set to dissolve once the chain sunset completes.

Hegotá EIP Targets ETH-Less Trading

The second development comes from Ethereum’s own roadmap rather than from a chain seeking its shelter. As highlighted in the Monday audio briefing from Japanese Web3 outlet あたらしい経済, developers have published a mandatory EIP for the planned Hegotá upgrade — a change that would allow users to transact on Ethereum without holding any ETH at all. An EIP, or Ethereum Improvement Proposal, is the network’s formal mechanism for changing its rules, and designating one mandatory removes any prospect of partial adoption at activation. Today, every mainnet operation requires the sender to hold ETH to cover the gas fee, a structural friction that has long complicated onboarding: a user who receives tokens through an airdrop or a custodial platform still cannot move them without first acquiring ETH for fees. Making the change part of the base rules moves fee-less interaction into the protocol itself instead of leaving it to individual wallet vendors. The proposal is also framed as supporting the network’s migration toward quantum-resistant Ethereum, a transition the Ethereum Foundation has targeted for December 2029 — an acknowledgment that new cryptographic assumptions eventually have to reach everyday transaction paths, not just research papers. Hegotá itself already has a delivery window: developers have scheduled EIP-8141 frame transactions for the 2027 upgrade. If Ethereum can settle transactions for people who never hold its native asset, consumer-facing applications — wallets, games, remittance services — can onboard them without a detour through an exchange.

Refuge and Risk Concentrate

Read together, the two stories describe gravity toward the Ethereum ecosystem from opposite directions. The official announcement is explicit that the project hopes its ONE token will be safer once the snapshot-based airdrop lands on Ethereum addresses — a damaged network betting its survival on Ethereum’s base-layer security. Against that, security firm CertiK tallied 344 incidents across the first half of 2026, with 153 — roughly 44% — occurring on Ethereum itself. Our reading: the base layer remains the industry’s refuge even as application-level risk concentrates on it, which shifts the burden onto each migrated project’s own code. Harmony’s three-day withdrawal window and Hegotá’s fee-less design will both test that premise in practice.