{"slug": "harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum", "title": "Harmony shuts down over AI fears, but will it be safer on Ethereum?", "summary": "Harmony Protocol is shutting down its blockchain network, citing threats from state actors and AI agents, and will migrate its $ONE token to Ethereum, where it hopes to be safer. The project, which suffered a $100 million bridge hack in 2022 and a recent unauthorized minting of 3 trillion tokens, will pivot to an AI video remix economy. However, Ethereum itself saw 153 of 344 security incidents in the first half of 2026, according to CertiK, raising questions about the safety of the move.", "body_md": "Blockchain network Harmony Protocol has taken the decision to wind down, worried that “threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great.”\n\nHarmony informed users on Sunday via X that the project, launched in 2019, would migrate to Ethereum, where it hoped its $ONE token would be safer.\n\nHowever, the prevalence of hacks currently wreaking havoc on the Ethereum ecosystem suggests that Harmony may well remain exposed in its new home.\n\nOn August 11, the protocol suffered an exploit which resulted in the “unauthorized minting” of 3 trillion native $ONE tokens. The team later executed a rollback of the chain, restoring its pre-hack state.\n\nThe price of $ONE dropped sharply directly after the hack and has lost more than 40% of its value over the past month.\n\nHarmony was previously rocked by a devastating $100 million hack of its Horizon bridge back in 2022, a year which saw multiple bridges lose nine-figure sums.\n\nAt its peak, earlier that same year, the network held over $1 billion of TVL. Today, that figure sits at just $150,000.\n\n## Running to safety\n\nThe migration will be based on a snapshot with user balances “airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.”\n\nTokens deposited in smart contracts, however, cannot be migrated and those users have been given just three days warning to withdraw any such funds.\n\nAt the same time as sunsetting the Harmony network and migrating to Ethereum, the project appears to be pivoting to become “the remix economy for AI video.”\n\nIt, rather ambitiously, eyes advertising revenue which “could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users.”\n\nThe migration announcement recommends that existing Harmony validators consider taking a new role as “governors, AI video operators or affiliates.”\n\n## Will Harmony be safer on Ethereum?\n\nWhile Harmony may not have the best track record, its chosen destination has itself served as the venue for an alarming number of security incidents over recent months.\n\nBlockchain security firm CertiK tallied a staggering 344 incidents which occurred in the first half of 2026 in a recent report. Of these, 153 were on the Ethereum network, approximately 44% of the total number.\n\nThe year’s uptick in exploits is suspected to be linked to the surge in powerful AI models.\n\nBack in June, the crypto community nervously awaited the release of Anthropic’s Fable before it quickly became clear that the model had been “nerfed” to avoid servicing cybersecurity-linked queries.\n\nThat said, at the protocol level, Ethereum is about as safe as blockchains get. Multiple other networks have recently suffered exploits targeting their structural layer, though.\n\nApart from the incident on Harmony, other recent examples came when a bug caused disruption and losses across at least four chains which all used a vulnerable Cosmos EVM module.\n\nOn Sunday, Blockstream’s Liquid Network was drained of 4000 bitcoin, worth around $320 million. The majority of funds have since been returned.\n\nAlso in late August, an exploit of Core DAO led to $5.5 million of validator rewards being issued ahead of schedule.\n\nUltimately, when hosted on a comparatively secure base layer protocol like Ethereum, safety rests on the quality of each individual project’s code. Whether or not Harmony’s new AI video venture will sink or swim is up to the team alone, no matter where it’s hosted.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum", "canonical_source": "https://cryptonews.net/news/blockchain/33413128/", "published_at": "2026-09-08 14:24:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-08 14:57:30.559249+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Harmony Protocol", "Ethereum", "CertiK", "Anthropic", "Blockstream", "Liquid Network", "Core DAO", "Cosmos EVM"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/harmony-shuts-down-over-ai-fears-but-will-it-be-safer-on-ethereum.jsonld"}}