Harmony has officially confirmed its complete network shutdown after announcing the proposal on September 7, 2026. The project has now confirmed that validators can begin shutting down nodes from September 10, 2026, with the final snapshot of the network scheduled to capture all token holdings across wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges. As reported by The Block, the project cited 'the threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great' as the primary reason for the definitive decision to abandon the independent blockchain after seven years of operation since 2019. The $1.372 million compensation pool for validators who shut down their nodes and transition to governors in the new initiative remains unchanged, with the project emphasizing that '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 proposed shutdown follows a major network exploit in August that forced Harmony to consider reversing days of blockchain activity after an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the cross-shard receipt-verification system. As reported by crypto.news, the attacker exploited a flaw that allowed valid receipts to be processed repeatedly, enabling new ONE tokens to be minted without an equivalent debit elsewhere on the network. Initial reports estimated that the attacker had minted 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, but subsequent reconstruction by Harmony found that more than 3 trillion tokens had been created across six transactions. The breach and subsequent decision to roll back the chain, which erased more than 109,000 legitimate transactions, appears to have pushed the project from attempting repairs to abandoning the independent network altogether. The total supply and emission schedule would remain unchanged under the new proposal, though the migration process requires users to withdraw assets from all smart contracts before September 10, 2026.
At the final Harmony block, the project plans to record ONE held in wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and centralized exchanges before distributing replacement tokens on Ethereum. According to the latest announcement, the process is intended to occur automatically for holders, delegators and validators, with delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards airdropped to individual governor vaults. The snapshot would cover personal wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts and holdings on centralized exchanges, with new ERC-20 tokens airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum, no claim process required. However, multisignature safes, liquidity pools and decentralized applications cannot be transferred through the proposed migration. The project has promised to publish the token contract, snapshot calculation and airdrop scripts for public audit, though liquidity pools and DeFi positions would be lost after the final block. Users should withdraw assets and exit all Harmony-based smart contracts before September 10, 2026, as failure to remove assets could make them inaccessible once validators shut down. The project also intends to coordinate with centralized exchanges to migrate ONE listings to the Ethereum-based token.
Harmony has proposed moving toward an AI video 'remix economy' once the blockchain is retired, offering existing validators the option of remaining as governors or becoming operators or affiliates in the new project. As reported by crypto.news, under the model, a small group of AI video creators would publish prompts and creative assets openly, with fans able to fork or remix the original material while AI agents would turn each variation into additional video clips. The project claims that a compliant operator could earn up to $1 million in first-year ecosystem revenue, with early promoters taking 30% of the $10 monthly subscriptions they refer. The second proposal repurposes ONE around this new business model, where future emissions would subsidize GPU demand and former validators would run generation and review nodes, staking the ERC-20 ONE for uptime-based rewards. The team has set aside $1.372 million to compensate qualifying validators who shut down their nodes, sign an agreement, retain their stakes, and become governors in the new initiative. However, none of these figures are binding, and the product itself remains unbuilt, with Harmony not confirming whether the sunset plan will be submitted through the established governance process. The project claims that advertising could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users in this new economy.
The network's native token has experienced significant volatility following the shutdown announcement, with ONE trading near $0.00074 on Monday, roughly 29% above the record low it set on August 12. However, ONE has dropped over 2% in the past day following the official shutdown confirmation. The token's market value is near $11 million, placing it outside the top 1,000 tokens by market cap. The shutdown announcement follows a pattern of Layer 1 networks abandoning operations, with BounceBit also retiring its Layer 1 in August after an attacker moved 286.5 million BB, reissuing the token on BNB Chain. The decision leaves unresolved questions for holders on centralized exchanges, as no exchange is obligated to credit an Ethereum-based airdrop, and custodial users face additional uncertainty. The proposal comes less than four weeks after an exploit created forged ONE tokens and led Harmony to plan a rollback that would wipe more than 109,000 transactions, marking a potential shift from repairing the network to ending it as an independent blockchain. The migration represents another data point in a pattern of Layer-1 chains folding into Ethereum's settlement layer rather than competing with it, as Ethereum's own roadmap pivots back toward base-layer scaling.
