Harmony shuts down over AI fears, but will it be safer on Ethereum?

Blockchain network Harmony Protocol has taken the decision to wind down, worried that “threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great.”

Harmony 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.

However, the prevalence of hacks currently wreaking havoc on the Ethereum ecosystem suggests that Harmony may well remain exposed in its new home.

On 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.

The price of $ONE dropped sharply directly after the hack and has lost more than 40% of its value over the past month.

Harmony 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.

At its peak, earlier that same year, the network held over $1 billion of TVL. Today, that figure sits at just $150,000.

Running to safety

The migration will be based on a snapshot with user balances “airdropped to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.”

Tokens deposited in smart contracts, however, cannot be migrated and those users have been given just three days warning to withdraw any such funds.

At 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.”

It, rather ambitiously, eyes advertising revenue which “could generate tens of millions of dollars from a million users.”

The migration announcement recommends that existing Harmony validators consider taking a new role as “governors, AI video operators or affiliates.”

Will Harmony be safer on Ethereum?

While 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.

Blockchain 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.

The year’s uptick in exploits is suspected to be linked to the surge in powerful AI models.

Back 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.

That 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.

Apart 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.

On Sunday, Blockstream’s Liquid Network was drained of 4000 bitcoin, worth around $320 million. The majority of funds have since been returned.

Also in late August, an exploit of Core DAO led to $5.5 million of validator rewards being issued ahead of schedule.

Ultimately, 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.