Harmony confirmed it had been exploited after on-chain data showed an attacker minted close to 4 billion ONE tokens and moved most of them onto exchanges. The token's price crashed more than 30% as the new supply hit the market, and Harmony says it is working with exchanges to freeze the funds while it weighs a rollback.
Harmony, a layer-1 blockchain platform, confirmed it had been exploited after on-chain analyst Juiceberg reported that an attacker minted close to 4 billion ONE tokens, equal to about 26% of the token's total supply. The attacker reportedly created the tokens by using empty blocks, a method that let new supply appear without triggering the network's usual checks.
According to Juiceberg, about 2.8 billion of the newly minted tokens were funneled to cryptocurrency exchanges as ONE's price fell, while roughly 115 million remained onchain. According to Juiceberg: "The attacker has roughly 115M ONE left to sell onchain", putting the unsold portion at about 2.9% of the total minted. ONE fell 33.9% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
Harmony moves to freeze funds
Harmony said it is working with its team and relevant exchanges to stop and freeze the funds, and that it is developing a patch while evaluating rollback options. The project identified four wallet addresses linked to the exploit and asked exchanges to block and freeze funds traced to them. Harmony has not disclosed the exact vulnerability or confirmed the final number of tokens involved.
A second major exploit
This is not Harmony's first major security incident. In June 2022, attackers stole crypto assets valued at nearly $100 million from the project's cross-chain bridge, Horizon, in a breach security experts linked to a compromise of the bridge's multi-signature wallet. The FBI later attributed that attack to the North Korean state-backed groups Lazarus Group and APT38.
Harmony launched its mainnet in 2019, pitching itself as a faster, cheaper alternative to Ethereum. The network remains under investigation, and Harmony has not yet disclosed the technical root cause of the exploit.
Sources: The Block, Cointelegraph, Coinpedia
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
