Harmony suffers critical exploit allowing attacker to mint ~4 billion ONE tokens (26% of supply); token crashes 26–40% as 2.8B tokens flood exchanges.
Security & Exploits ·
Harmony's ONE token crashed roughly 40% after an exploit created approximately 4 billion new tokens, representing more than a quarter of the existing supply. The attacker leveraged an "empty blocks" vulnerability to mint tokens without authorization. Approximately 2.8 billion of the newly created tokens were sent to exchanges, intensifying downward price pressure across venues.
The Harmony team confirmed the incident and instructed network operators to deploy an emergency software update to halt further minting. The project also suspended its cross-chain bridge and requested exchanges freeze funds tied to four addresses connected to the attack. Separately, Harmony is evaluating patch deployment and potential rollback strategies to reverse the unauthorized token creation, though a rollback would undo legitimate transactions that occurred after the exploit.
This marks at least the second major token-creation event for Harmony in recent years. A December 2023 bug in the staking mechanism improperly minted approximately 146.3 million ONE tokens. The broader remediation path remains uncertain: while a rollback could remove newly created tokens still held on-chain, recovering funds already deposited on exchanges poses technical and operational challenges.