Harmony Suffers Critical Exploit As 4B ONE Are Minted Without Authorization, ZachXBT Boycotts Recovery Efforts

Harmony, a Layer 1 blockchain, has confirmed a important exploit wherein roughly 4 billion ONE tokens had been minted with out authorization through empty blocks, representing roughly 26% of the token’s pre-existing provide. 

On-chain analyst Juiceberg reported that the attacker rapidly routed round 2.8 billion ONE to centralized exchanges because the token value collapsed. According to Juiceberg, the attacker retains solely about 115 million ONE on-chain—roughly 2.9% of the illicit provide—whereas “the overwhelming majority, roughly 97%, is already on exchanges and has both been offered or is sitting in deposit wallets able to promote.”

The market response was quick. ONE plunged roughly 40% to commerce close to $0.0008, inserting the nominal worth of the stolen tokens at roughly $3.2 million. Compounding the opacity, Harmony’s totalSupply endpoint didn’t instantly mirror the inflation, probably obscuring the dilution from customers and monitoring methods.

In response, Harmony instructed validators to put in an emergency patch stopping additional minting, paused its token bridge, and printed 4 pockets addresses linked to the incident, asking exchanges to freeze related funds. The community said it’s growing a complete patch and evaluating rollback choices.

Investigator Boycott and Rollback Dilemma Complicate Recovery

The incident has drawn renewed scrutiny to Harmony’s historical past of safety lapses and its remedy of the investigator neighborhood. On-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly refused to help with the present incident, stating: “I can’t be monitoring this incident and assume nobody ought to help them at no cost.” 

He cited Harmony’s dealing with of the 2022 Horizon Bridge exploit—attributed by the FBI to North Korea’s Lazarus Group—wherein the community allegedly “took benefit of people that assisted” and “rewarded $0 for vital freezes which result in LE seizures and easily stated ‘good job.’”

This boycott emphasises a deepening belief deficit as Harmony considers a blockchain rollback, which might revert the community to a pre-exploit state however erase subsequent transactions—a measure broadly seen as antithetical to blockchain immutability. The activity is additional sophisticated by the truth that most funds have already reached exchanges. 

The exploit additionally marks Harmony’s third main safety failure in recent times, following a December 2023 staking bug that created 146.3 million ONE and the 2022 bridge assault that drained roughly $100 million. Harmony has not but disclosed the technical root trigger of the present breach.

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