Harmony has formally proposed shutting down its independent Layer 1 blockchain and moving its native ONE token onto Ethereum. In a September 6 post, the project said pressure from state-backed attackers and AI agents had become too severe to keep operating a standalone network.
Mainnet went live in 2019.
After years of patches, incidents, and community effort, the team now argues it is time to retire the chain entirely.
The announcement is framed as a non-binding proposal.
Harmony did not name a final block height or confirm that validator governance will vote under existing rules. Still, the operational calendar is specific.
Validators may stop running nodes from 7 a.m. Pacific Time on September 10, 2026.
The team said it would cover the emission-reward gap between each node’s last produced block and the network’s last block.
A separate one-time pool of $1.372 million would go to validators and their delegators who shut down on schedule, sign an agreement, keep their stakes, and take “governor” roles in the successor project.
Payments would be split across four quarters.
Harmony said that figure matches network-wide rewards issued in the year before the August 11 incident.
Validators are also being invited to stay as governors, become AI-video operators, or work as affiliates.
Token migration is designed to require little from ordinary holders.
At the final block, Harmony would snapshot ONE in wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and centralized exchanges.
New ERC-20 ONE would then be airdropped to the same addresses on Ethereum.
No claim process is planned. Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would go to individual governor vaults.
Total supply and the emission rate would stay the same; future issuance would fund the new product, subject to governor input.
— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) September 6, 2026
The team said it would publish the ERC-20 contract, vault contract, snapshot math, and airdrop scripts for audit.Some assets cannot move.
Multisig safes, liquidity pools, and other on-chain applications are excluded. Users have been told to leave those contracts before September 10.
The successor product is branded “The Remix Economy for AI Video.”
Harmony’s public account already uses that line in its bio.
The model is built around open prompts and source material that fans can fork. AI agents would then expand each remix into more clips.
In year one, Harmony said it would subsidize operator GPU costs and aim for up to $1 million in combined operator revenue, tied to staking and uptime.
Affiliates would earn a recurring 30 percent commission on $10 monthly subscriptions sold through referrals.
Advertising, the team has suggested elsewhere, could scale if the audience grows large enough.
The timing matters. In mid-August an exploit forged a huge quantity of unauthorized ONE.
Harmony first prepared a rollback that would have discarded more than 100,000 transactions.
Weeks later, the conversation has shifted from repairing the chain to ending it as a sovereign Layer 1 and rebuilding on Ethereum around AI video.
For holders, the practical next step is leaving contracts that will not migrate.
For validators, it is deciding whether to shut down on the stated date and accept the governor path. The proposal itself is still only a proposal. Execution, exchange listings, and community consent remain open questions.