Developers of the Harmony network have proposed shutting down the seven year-old blockchain and moving its $ONE token to Ethereum, saying the cost and difficulty of defending the network against increasingly capable attackers has become too great.
“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” the project wrote on X on Sunday. “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.”
Retiring a blockchain is an unusual move. Chains that fail normally lose users and developers until nothing is left running on them, rather than announcing a closure and a migration plan.
The proposal is explicitly non-binding and carries a disclaimer saying all plans are subject to change.
Harmony has not said whether the shutdown will go to a governance process the network uses for other decisions, in which elected validators — a term for entities that maintain a network using their computing resources — submit proposals and voting power is weighted by stake.
A one-time Ethereum rival
Harmony drew serious money at its peak, drawing interest for its extremely fast and cheap network that was pegged as competitor for Ethereum and other upstarts, such as Solana. Native token $ONE reached about 38 cents in October 2021, and by January 2022 the network held more than a billion dollars of user deposits, with the game DeFi Kingdoms alone accounting for $747 million of it.
