Harmony to Fully Sunset Its Layer-1 Network, Proposes Migrating ONE to Ethereum for an AI Video Pivot
For seven years, Harmony’s validators kept a Layer-1 blockchain running that most of crypto had stopped paying close attention to — a network built for cheap, fast transactions that never quite broke into the top tier of chains it was competing against. This month, the team running it decided to stop pretending otherwise, and instead of quietly fading out, announced it would tear the whole thing down and try something almost entirely unrelated.
Harmony said it plans to fully sunset its Layer-1 network and has proposed migrating its native ONE token over to Ethereum, framing security as the immediate justification. “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the team wrote in announcing the decision, a line that reads as an admission that maintaining an independent, security-hardened blockchain had become a fight the project no longer wanted to keep fighting.
That framing lands against a rough year for Harmony’s security. In August, an exploit let an attacker mint billions of unauthorized ONE tokens outside the protocol’s normal supply, forcing the team to work with exchanges to freeze funds while it patched the underlying vulnerability and weighed whether to roll back the chain to erase the fraudulent transactions. That episode alone would have been a serious blow to confidence in the network. Combined with this new sunset announcement, it looks less like an isolated incident and more like the moment that made the shutdown decision inevitable.
The pivot Harmony is proposing instead has almost nothing to do with blockchain infrastructure. The team wants to build what it’s calling a “remix economy” for AI-generated video: creators publish open prompts and source assets, other users and AI agents fork or “remix” those originals into new clips, and the token economics are meant to reward the whole chain of creation rather than a single output. It’s a sharp turn for a project that spent years positioning itself as a scaling solution for decentralized apps.
The mechanics of the token migration are meant to be largely hands-off for holders. Harmony’s plan calls for airdropping new ONE tokens on Ethereum to the same wallet addresses holders currently use, with total supply and the emission schedule left unchanged — newly issued tokens would simply be redirected to fund the AI video initiative going forward. Validators can stop running nodes starting September 10, and the team has set aside a $1.37 million pool to compensate validators who sign a transition agreement, keep their existing stake in place, and move into a new “governor” role within the AI video project instead. Holdings sitting in multisig wallets, liquidity pools, or on-chain applications won’t migrate automatically, meaning anyone with ONE parked in those places needs to exit before the September 10 cutoff or risk being left behind in the transition.
What happens to Harmony’s existing decentralized app ecosystem once the underlying chain is gone is left largely unaddressed in the announcement — a gap that matters for any project or user still building on a network that, as of this announcement, has an expiration date.
This article is not financial advice. Token migrations tied to a network shutdown carry real execution risk, including missed deadlines for exiting contracts or liquidity positions — always verify official migration instructions directly before acting. To understand how Layer-1 blockchains and token migrations work, visit coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.