Harmony, the layer-1 blockchain launched in 2019, has proposed permanently shutting down its own network — saying that threats from state actors and AI agents have become too great to keep defending it.
"The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great," the Harmony team wrote on X. "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 announcement reframes a defensive calculation that more projects are now making openly: whether a small proof-of-stake network's validator set and engineering capacity can survive an era in which offensive tooling has become cheap.
The Migration Plan
The proposal, which the team describes as non-binding, would move the ONE token to Ethereum. A snapshot of balances at the network's final block would determine allocations of replacement tokens airdropped to the same addresses, covering wallets, staked tokens, validator rewards, and exchange holdings.
One deadline is hard: multisig safes, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, and users are urged to exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026 — two days after the proposal was published.
Eligible validators and their delegators would be paid from a $1.372 million pool in four quarterly installments, provided they retain their stakes, sign an agreement, and serve as governors of what comes next. Future token emissions would be redirected toward an "AI video" initiative, subject to governor feedback.
The Backstory
The security posture that led here is documented. In August, Harmony confirmed an exploit in which an attacker minted roughly 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens. The team released a patch and said it was considering a rollback — a measure that would reverse transactions by restoring an earlier version of the chain.
The sunset proposal arrives amid a broader wave of suspected AI-assisted attacks on crypto infrastructure. In July, Coldcard maker Coinkite said it suspected an attacker had used AI to find a flaw that made wallet keys easier to guess — a vulnerability its own AI review had missed — leading to thefts that ultimately exceeded $100 million and a full overhaul of its security practices. In response, developers formed the Bitcoin Red Team, roughly 20 to 25 volunteers combining AI models with human review to find vulnerabilities in wallets and payment software before attackers do.
Harmony's answer to the same pressure is the opposite of hardening: exit the attack surface entirely and relocate to a chain with a larger defensive perimeter.
What It Means
A network that decides it cannot defend itself is a data point about the economics of security, not a failure of any single team. Small validator sets, aging codebases, and finite developer attention are exactly the profile that modern attackers — automated or state-backed — select for. Whether Harmony's holders view a migration to Ethereum as rescue or wind-down depends on terms that, for now, remain a proposal awaiting governance.
TrustGrade tracks the security posture of chains and infrastructure operators. For verified trust data on the projects shaping the ecosystem, see trustgrade.ai.