Harmony has proposed to voluntarily shut down its Layer-1 blockchain and migrate its native ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20 asset, the project said in an X post on Sept. 6. The plan would retire the network that launched in 2019 and redirect the token’s future emissions toward an artificial-intelligence video business.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great. 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,” the project wrote.
How the migration would work
Under the proposal, Harmony would take a final snapshot of ONE balances and issue matching ERC-20 tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum. The snapshot would cover tokens held in wallets, staking positions, validator rewards and centralized exchanges, and holders would not need to claim the new assets themselves.
Harmony said it would publish the Ethereum contract, snapshot calculations and airdrop scripts for public review. The proposal is explicitly non-binding and carries a disclaimer that all plans are subject to change, and the project has not said whether the shutdown will pass through its validator governance process.
A network that struggled to stay secure
ONE reached roughly 38 cents in October 2021 and the network held more than $1 billion in deposits by January 2022. But the Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in June 2022, an attack the FBI later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and ONE’s price fell as much as 99% from its peak.
More recently, on Aug. 11, an attacker exploited a flaw in the way the chain verified transactions moving between shards, minting more than three trillion unauthorized ONE across six transactions. Harmony rolled the chain back, permanently removing more than 109,000 transactions from its history.
The AI video pivot
If the chain disappears, the emissions once used to reward validators would instead fund what Harmony calls the “Remix Economy for AI Video.” The project describes the business as a subscription service where creators publish prompts and assets that people and AI agents can reuse to generate new video clips.
The shift would take Harmony, once pitched as a fast and cheap Ethereum rival, out of the Layer-1 race entirely. It also fits a broader unwind of crypto infrastructure that has seen several projects shut down this year. Whether the migration proceeds as outlined remains an open question until Harmony details a binding plan and any governance approval is confirmed.
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