Harmony Blockchain Hit by Exploit, Billions of ONE Tokens Minted
The Layer 1 blockchain Harmony has been targeted by an attacker who minted at least 4 billion of its native ONE token, causing the cryptocurrency to plummet to a new all-time low.
Data from CoinGecko indicates that the ONE token fell to $0.0005735 following the incident.
On August 12, X user Juiceberg was among the first to report the exploit, stating that an unidentified individual had minted 4 billion ONE tokens, representing approximately 26% of the total supply. The attacker then moved about 2.8 billion of these tokens to exchanges.
“The attacker has roughly 115M ONE left to sell onchain — about 2.9% of the ~4B they minted,” the on-chain analyst wrote. “Approximately 97% is already on exchanges and has either been sold or is sitting in deposit wallets ready to sell.”
The Harmony protocol later acknowledged the incident but did not immediately disclose the root cause or confirm the exact number of tokens minted by the hacker. The team stated they were collaborating with several exchanges to freeze the illicitly minted funds and were developing a patch to address the vulnerability, along with rollback options. They pledged to provide further updates as new information became available.
Harmony has identified four wallet addresses associated with the theft: one1uap…43014510, one17u300a…6408efe5, one1a5hur07z…73bb08eb, and one1h56hkx…58ff1a70ba. The protocol has requested all exchanges to block and freeze any funds traceable to these addresses. In response to the exploit, the team has also paused the LayerZero-Harmony bridge and instructed validators to apply a patch to prevent further unauthorized minting of ONE tokens.
“We’ll follow up with another update to address already minted tokens,” the team stated.
This is not the first security breach for Harmony. In 2022, the protocol lost approximately $100 million when its Horizon Bridge was exploited.
Prior to the latest incident, the ONE token was trading around $0.00117. It experienced a sharp decline to approximately $0.00057, marking a new all-time low. At the time of reporting, the token had recovered slightly, trading 33% above its all-time low, but still represented a nearly 40% loss within a 24-hour period. Over the past seven days, the asset has fallen 32%, and its monthly chart shows a decline of over 28%, according to CoinGecko data.
The Harmony exploit occurred shortly after a separate incident that targeted the XRPL-Coreum bridge, resulting in the theft of nearly 200,000 XRP. In that attack, the hacker reportedly manipulated the bridge’s deposit-checking system to misinterpret a wallet-to-wallet transfer as a legitimate deposit.
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