Harmony wants to throw in the towel and migrate to Ethereum

Seven years of blockchain, a question mark. Harmony wants to throw in the towel. The project proposes to turn off its own layer 1, migrate the ONE token to Ethereum, and redirect its future emissions towards a radically different bet: a video platform generated by artificial intelligence called “Remix Economy”. If the proposal passes, users will have until September 10 to exit their smart contracts, before validators begin unplugging their nodes.

Seven years of blockchain, threatened by an announcement

The team justifies its decision, according to Decrypt, with a blunt sentence: “the threats posed by state actors and AI agents have become too great.” Neither precise figure nor dated incident cited in support, but a context which speaks for itself. Harmony has already suffered a $100 million hack on its Horizon bridge in 2022, then a cross-shard verification flaw that allowed the creation of more than 3,000 billion ONE tokens out of nowhere last month.

Multisig wallets, liquidity pools and on-chain applications simply cannot be transferred: they must be emptied before the deadline. Replacement tokens will then be released to the same addresses on the Ethereum side, total supply and rate of issuance unchanged. Only the destination of future emissions changes in nature.

To cushion the shock, Harmony is offering to pay $1.372 million to validators and their delegators, divided into four quarterly payments, on the condition that they keep their stakes and become governors of the new system. A gesture which does not erase an embarrassing precedent: this is not the first time that a chain closes and drags its token into the fall.