Harmony Public Chain Faces Vulnerability Attack Leading to Minting of Approximately 4 Billion ONE
The high-performance public chain Harmony experienced a security incident today. On-chain analysis shows that attackers exploited a vulnerability related to empty blocks to mint approximately 4 billion ONE without authorization, accounting for about 26% of the current supply.
Of these, approximately 2.8 billion ONE were subsequently transferred to trading platforms, causing significant selling pressure, and the price of ONE dropped sharply during the day.
Harmony's official statement indicated that the team is collaborating with relevant trading platforms to stop and freeze the involved funds, while also developing a repair plan and assessing rollback options.
Before the incident, Harmony's total market capitalization was about $17 million, which further declined afterward, but the actual market value loss was limited.
This public chain previously suffered a theft of about $100 million in the 2022 Horizon cross-chain bridge incident, attributed to a North Korean hacker group, leading to a continuous decline in its ecosystem.
From a market mechanism perspective, the incident was driven by on-chain vulnerabilities and minting, with funds flowing from newly minted tokens to exchanges for sale; the beneficiaries were the exchanges that froze the funds in time, while the pressured parties were ONE holders and remaining ecosystem participants.
Currently, on-chain DeFi locking and activity levels are at extremely low levels.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Harmony was founded in 2018 by Stephen Tse and others, initially completing financing and IEO with narratives of sharding and high performance, reaching a market cap close to $4 billion in 2021. However, trust collapsed after the cross-chain bridge was hacked in 2022, leading to long-term losses in TVL and users, and this recent minting further undermines the remaining liquidity.
In terms of capital flow, the attackers directly minted and transferred funds to exchanges for cashing out, motivated by the desire to quickly liquidate using low market cap and low attention, with resources flowing directly from on-chain supply to secondary market selling pressure.
Similar cases can be seen in other small public chains experiencing minting or bridging vulnerability incidents, as well as the limited effects of subsequent rollback and freezing attempts. Currently, small-cap public chains are in a phase of frequent security incidents and weak recovery capabilities.
The structural judgment belongs to technical substitution, with the mechanism being that empty block or supply validation vulnerabilities can instantly alter token economics, forcing projects to weigh between patches and rollbacks, accelerating the elimination of marginal public chains towards more mature and secure architectures.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
The cost of vulnerabilities in low market cap public chains is far lower than the attack gains.
A 26% minting is sufficient to instantly destroy remaining confidence.
Rollback options often become ineffective once funds have entered exchanges.