Harmony ONE hit by unauthorized 4B mint as price plunges
Harmony is investigating an unauthorized mint on its Layer 1 blockchain. An attacker created at least 4B ONE tokens and moved about 2.8B ONE to exchanges. On-chain alerts suggest around 115M ONE may still be available for on-chain selling, while most supply appears already on exchanges or in deposit wallets.
Harmony identified four suspected wallet addresses and asked exchanges to block and freeze funds tied to them. The protocol paused the LayerZero–Harmony bridge, and instructed validators to upgrade with a patch to prevent further minting. Harmony is working on fixes and possible rollback options, but has not disclosed the full root cause.
Price action was immediate: ONE fell to near a new all-time low around $0.0005735 and had traded near ~$0.00117 earlier. The incident is also linked to renewed bridge/security concerns after a separate XRPL–Coreum bridge attack involving stolen XRP.
For traders, the key watch items for ONE are exchange freeze execution (liquidity impact), whether additional supply details or a rollback are confirmed, and timing around bridge/validator patches—factors that can drive sharp short-term volatility.
Bearish
This event is directly negative for ONE because it signals abnormal new supply (an unauthorized 4B ONE mint) and raises immediate counterparty/liquidity risk via possible exchange inflows. Even if Harmony freezes funds, traders typically demand confirmation on total affected supply and whether a rollback is implemented. The protocol actions (bridge pause and validator patch) reduce the chance of further minting, but the lack of full root-cause clarity keeps uncertainty high—usually a bearish backdrop until supply reconciliation is confirmed.
Short term, volatility is likely to remain elevated as the market prices in potential selling pressure, freezing effectiveness, and any announcement cadence around rollback/patches. Long term, the impact depends on how convincingly Harmony demonstrates security remediation and whether ONCE-related token supply concerns are fully resolved; until then, sentiment for ONE is likely to stay pressured.