Harmony Proposes Shutdown of Mainnet to Shift Focus to AI Video
Harmony has released two proposals to fully shut down its mainnet launched in 2019, migrate its native token ONE to Ethereum, and shift its development focus to the AI video secondary creation economy, citing significant threats from national-level attackers and AI agents.
Validators can stop running nodes starting from 7 AM Pacific Time on September 10, 2026. The team plans to compensate for the difference in rewards from the shutdown until the final block, establishing a one-time compensation pool of $1.372 million, which will be distributed over four quarters to validators and their delegators who timely shut down nodes, sign agreements, retain staking, and continue to serve as governors of the new project.
The migration will take a snapshot of user wallets, staking delegations, validator rewards, smart contracts, and ONE in centralized exchanges at the last block of the network. New tokens will be airdropped to the same Ethereum addresses, and holders do not need to claim them; delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards will enter the respective governors' treasury. Multi-signature wallets, liquidity pools, and on-chain applications cannot be migrated, and the team requests users to exit all smart contracts by September 10, planning to publicly disclose token contracts, snapshot calculations, and airdrop scripts for auditing.
The total supply of ONE and the rate of issuance will remain unchanged, with future new issuance intended for AI video projects, and arrangements will be made to gather feedback from governors. The new business will open prompts and materials for creators and fans for secondary creation, which will then be expanded into more stories by AI agents.
The team is recruiting operators responsible for video generation, media distribution, and content review; the first year's hardware costs will be subsidized to drive generation demand. Operators must stake tokens to qualify, earn rewards based on the online duration of generation services, and bear the remaining costs themselves, while the platform tracks and incentivizes contributions from original, secondary creation, and promotion.
Mechanically, the seller is the L1 team unable to continue bearing the costs of mainnet security and nodes, while the buyer is the Ethereum settlement layer and operators willing to stake for GPU subsidies. The event is driven by both security pressure and narrative shift: on-chain liquidity must withdraw from contracts and pools before the shutdown, and tokens will migrate from independent L1 accounting to ETH contracts; beneficiaries are validators who timely sign contracts and convert their stakes into new governance seats, while those under pressure are holdings locked in multi-signatures, LPs, and applications that cannot be mapped.
Public information has not provided the final shutdown block height, the split ratio of compensation between validators and delegators, nor quantified the subsidy amount for AI video in the first year.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Harmony's security history is not an abstract slogan: after the Horizon cross-chain bridge was hacked, a compensation plan was proposed, and in August 2026, an incident occurred where an unauthorized attacker minted about 4 billion ONE, approximately a quarter of the then supply, with about 97% flowing into exchanges, causing the token to drop about 37% that day. Shutting down the mainnet is a choice to stop operating a chain that cannot be secured after repeatedly patching consensus and bridges, rather than issuing another patch.
The capital path changes the continuous issuance of L1 from "paying validators to survive" to "paying GPU operators and secondary creation contributions." The $1.372 million compensation buys the right for validators to timely shut down, sign, continue to lock up, and enter new governance, effectively using a one-time fiat pool to buy out the right to strike nodes. The new issuance of ONE will no longer serve block production but will serve the online duration of video generation, shifting resources from hashes and sharding to computing power and material distribution.
Comparable cases include Terra starting a new chain after its collapse, some sidechains migrating tokens to Ethereum to become regular ERC-20s, and several gaming public chains downgrading "chains" to "points contracts." In terms of industry positioning, Harmony has moved away from the expansion phase to attract developers and is now in a transformation phase focused on controlling residual liquidity and rebranding to the AI narrative; independent settlement rights have been abandoned, retaining only the token symbol and governance roster.
The structural judgment belongs to the overlay of technical substitution and industrial chain reconstruction: when national-level attackers and automated agents breach the security budget of small validator collectives, the cost of running an L1 exceeds migrating to Ethereum for token issuance. The mechanism is that when security expenditures cannot be covered by transaction fees, issuance will shift from consensus subsidies to content subsidies, with the chain itself becoming a closable server and tokens becoming entry points for new business.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Chains that cannot be secured will ultimately become airdrop lists.
When the security budget is insufficient, narrative moves before consensus.
Compensation for shutting down nodes buys the right not to produce blocks.