Harmony Proposes Retiring Layer-1 Mainnet and Migrating ONE to Ethereum (ETH)

ONE Set to Become an ERC-20 Token

Harmony has proposed retiring its layer-1 blockchain entirely and reissuing its native ONE token as an ERC-20 asset on Ethereum (ETH) mainnet, according to the project's official Sept. 6 announcement. The plan is explicitly non-binding and subject to change, and no date has been set for the final block. Harmony cited security threats from state actors and AI agents, saying the community has overcome repeated attacks since the mainnet launched in 2019 but that the time has come to wind the network down. At the final block, Harmony plans to record ONE held in user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchange accounts before distributing replacement tokens. No claim process is required: ERC-20 ONE would be airdropped to the same addresses captured in the snapshot, while delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards flow into individual governor vaults. The token's total supply and emission rate would remain unchanged, and the team says the token contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts will be published so they can be audited. Not everything can move. Multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated through the proposal, so holders are being asked to exit contracts before Sept. 10. Exchange-held ONE is included in the planned snapshot, with Harmony proposing to coordinate moving centralized exchange listings to the Ethereum (ETH) version of the token — a shift that would place ONE inside the broader Ethereum ecosystem and subject it to Ethereum gas fees and tooling rather than Harmony's own consensus.

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The project's official Sept. 6 announcement.

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$1.372M Pool for Node Operators

Validators face a separate transition. Node operators can begin shutting down from Sept. 10, with a cutoff at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on that date. Harmony has earmarked $1.372 million for validators and delegators who stop their nodes on time, sign an agreement, retain their stakes and continue as governors, with payouts spread over four quarters and covering the difference in emission rewards between a validator's last block and the network's final block. The team wants to redirect future ONE emissions into an AI video “remix economy”: a small group of creators would publish prompts and assets fans could fork or remix, with AI agents turning the branches into new clips. Operators would handle generation, distribution and moderation, with staking and uptime tied to rewards. Harmony plans to subsidize GPU hardware in the first year and says operators could generate up to $1 million in combined revenue, alongside a $10 monthly subscription and a 30% referral commission. The proposal arrives less than a month after an exploit forced the project to consider rewinding the chain. On Aug. 12, an unauthorized mint was detected; Harmony's reconstruction later found more than 3 trillion ONE created across six transactions, traced to a flaw in cross-shard receipt verification that let valid receipts be processed more than once. One linked wallet attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE each within 106 seconds — 477 succeeded, moving 2.385 trillion ONE. The project rolled back to Aug. 11 checkpoints, removing 141,628 consecutive shard-0 blocks containing 109,126 regular transactions, 95.8% of them classified as automated activity. Token migration was examined then but rejected as too disruptive; weeks later, it anchors the plan to retire the network. Harmony's record also includes the June 2022 Horizon bridge hack of close to $100 million and a December 2023 staking flaw that minted 146.28 million ONE. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Consolidation Onto Ethereum

The market has yet to reward the pivot. ONE slipped more than 2% in the past day, trading near $0.00074 on Monday — roughly 29% above the record low of $0.0005735 it set on Aug. 12 — with a market value near $11 million that leaves it outside the top 1,000 tokens by market cap. Per the new source, the August exploit minted about 4 billion ONE, close to 26% of total supply, a figure that frames the rollback the article already details. Harmony also follows a precedent: BounceBit retired its layer-1 in August after an attacker moved 286.5 million BB and reissued its token on BNB Chain, a parallel the sunset notice itself did not mention.

Additional details from the sunset notice underline how abruptly the reversal came. Harmony was still shipping mainnet development into 2026 — releasing the v2026.0.0 network version in March and preparing a major hard fork as recently as April — before pivoting within months to retiring the chain. The proposal's mention of state-level attackers also has concrete precedent: the FBI confirmed in 2023 that the June 2022 Horizon bridge hack was carried out by North Korea's Lazarus Group and APT38. Market data shows the depth of the decline — ONE peaked near $0.379 on Oct. 26, 2021, making the current price roughly 99.8% below its all-time high, with circulating supply of about 14.87 billion tokens and roughly $1.41 million in daily volume. The team's AI video model also carries an untested upside: it estimates advertising could generate tens of millions of dollars annually if the platform reaches 1 million users.

One angle the sunset notice did not address is the tax treatment for American holders. Because the IRS treats digital assets as property, exchanging one token for another that differs materially in kind or extent can trigger a capital gain or loss, and the agency has not issued guidance covering this specific mainnet-to-Ethereum migration. U.S. holders may therefore need to preserve original purchase records, wallet history, the final snapshot and the value of the replacement token when received, while exchange customers should retain migration notices and any Form 1099-DA information their platforms supply. Separately, Harmony has not yet released the ERC-20 contract address or the final snapshot method, nor a list of participating exchanges, leaving those operational details open.

The security rationale behind the sunset has also gained wider industry context. TRM Labs reported 207 crypto hacks in the first half of 2026, with roughly $972 million stolen, nearly $577 million of which stemmed from two incidents attributed to North Korea. Harmony's warning about AI agents is not hypothetical either: an Anthropic study covering 832 accounts banned for cybercrime activity found that accounts rated medium- or high-risk rose from about 33% in the first half of the study to 56% in the second, while OpenAI claims its GPT-6 Astra model has reached "critical" cybersecurity capability. On-chain activity underscores the economic squeeze as well — DefiLlama data puts Harmony's DeFi total value locked at roughly $151,000, and a newer CoinGecko reading pegs ONE's market cap at about $10.7 million, suggesting the chain poses little systemic risk but can no longer justify its own security and infrastructure costs.

(as of 08:27 UTC) For COINOTAG, the common thread is consolidation: Ethereum (ETH) keeps absorbing networks that can no longer justify running their own consensus, with Lisk Chain also scheduled to shut on Oct. 31 — a thinning of the altcoin base layer. Critically, the proposal has no recorded vote yet. Harmony has not confirmed whether it will enter its validator-led governance process, which under published rules requires participation representing 51% of total stake weight and 66.7% support after a seven-day introduction period and a 14-day voting period. Until a recorded outcome exists, the migration remains a proposal, not a commitment, and the Sept. 10 contract-exit deadline is the first hard date to watch. As context on the destination chain, Vitalik Buterin has argued that over 90% of Ethereum activity could skip full validation, and our Ethereum 2.0 upgrade guide traces how the network reshaped itself across its major upgrades.