Harmony confirms unauthorized mint of 4 billion ONE, says it is weighing a rollback

Harmony, the proof-of-stake layer 1 that launched in 2019 pitching itself as a cheaper Ethereum alternative, confirmed on Wednesday that it had been exploited, after an on-chain researcher flagged the unauthorized creation of 4 billion ONE tokens. The Block reported the confirmation, citing Harmony's statement on X.

The alarm was raised earlier the same day by an X user posting as Juiceberg, who put the mint at 4 billion ONE and said the attacker had already moved most of it. "The attacker has roughly 115M ONE left to sell onchain — about 2.9% of the ~4B they minted," Juiceberg wrote, adding that roughly 97% was "already on exchanges and has either been sold or is sitting in deposit wallets ready to sell." Those figures are one researcher's on-chain estimate, not a confirmed accounting by Harmony or any exchange.

Harmony replied directly to that post. According to The Block, the project said it is working with its own team and relevant exchanges to stop and freeze the funds, is developing a patch, and is evaluating rollback options. It has not disclosed a technical root cause, and the incident is still under investigation. The Block said it had contacted Harmony for further detail.

ONE fell about 34% over 24 hours to roughly $0.0008, per The Block, which valued the minted supply at approximately $3.2 million at that price. The Block's own price widget in the same article showed ONE down 35.59% — a small internal discrepancy, so read the decline as roughly 34–36%.

This is Harmony's second serious incident. In June 2022, its Horizon cross-chain bridge was drained of assets worth close to $100 million, including ether and stablecoins; security researchers tied the breach to a compromise of the bridge's multisig. In January 2023, the FBI attributed that attack to North Korea's Lazarus Group and APT 38.

Key facts

• 4 billion ONE minted without authorization; Harmony confirmed the exploit Wednesday (The Block, citing Harmony's X statement).
• ~115 million ONE, or ~2.9% of the mint, still on-chain; ~97% already at exchanges, sold or staged to sell (Juiceberg on X, via The Block).
• ONE down ~34% to ~$0.0008; ~$3.2 million implied value of the mint at that price (The Block; its price widget showed −35.59%).
• Harmony response: exchange freezes sought, patch in development, rollback "options" under evaluation. Root cause undisclosed (The Block).
• Prior incident: ~$100 million Horizon bridge hack, June 2022; FBI attribution to Lazarus Group and APT 38, January 2023 (The Block).

The real-world read

The $3.2 million figure is arithmetic on a post-crash price. It measures what the stolen tokens are worth now, not what the attacker realised while dumping into a falling market — and if ~97% hit exchanges before the drop, actual proceeds are unknown and plausibly different. Nobody has published fills.

"Evaluating rollback options" is the line to sit with. A chain that markets itself as a decentralized Ethereum alternative is publicly considering rewriting its own ledger, and simultaneously asking centralized exchanges to freeze funds. Both may be defensible; neither is what the pitch says.

Note also what the response implies. "Developing a patch" points at a code-level minting flaw rather than a stolen key — but Harmony has not said so, and until it does, the mechanism is unconfirmed. Freezing requests are also mostly moot for tokens already sold.

Opinion, and whose

The only forecast-adjacent claim here belongs to Juiceberg, whose "ready to sell" characterisation of exchange deposit wallets is an inference about intent, not an observed transaction. Harmony's suggestion that funds can be stopped and frozen is the affected party's own framing of its prospects. No third-party security firm has published an assessment yet.

Sources

• The Block (Danny Park), 12 Aug 2026 — Harmony's confirmation, the response measures, price and valuation figures, and the 2022 Horizon/FBI background. Secondary reporting: it cites Harmony's X statement and Juiceberg's X post. The Block discloses that Foresight Ventures, an investor in crypto companies with exchange Bitget as an anchor LP, is its majority investor.
• Juiceberg (X) — the 4 billion mint figure and the 97% / 115 million ONE distribution estimate, quoted via The Block. Independent on-chain researcher; unverified by Cleartext.
• Harmony (X statement) — quoted via The Block; an interested party describing its own incident.

No sponsored or commissioned material was used. Harmony has not answered questions on root cause.

Not financial advice. Prices and on-chain estimates cited here were accurate at the time of writing during an unresolved incident.