Harmony ONE Mint Exploit: 4B Tokens, Price -37% as Bridge Paused

Harmony has confirmed an unauthorized mint exploit on its Layer 1 network, involving roughly 4 billion ONE tokens—about 26% of the supply. After Harmony shipped a patch to stop further minting, ONE fell around 37% to about $0.00077. On-chain analyst Juiceberg flagged the issue early, saying the minting happened via “empty blocks.” He estimated about 2.8B ONE were moved to exchanges and that ~97% of the minted ONE had already reached exchanges or deposit wallets, leaving around 115M ONE (2.9%) still potentially on-chain for sale. Harmony says it is working with exchanges to freeze and block traced attacker funds. It also released a validator upgrade patch to prevent additional minting and paused the LayerZero Harmony bridge shortly after the first public notice. Four suspected attacker wallets were shared (Harmony and hex formats), and exchanges were asked to block assets linked to those addresses. The project has not disclosed the full root cause or final totals for tokens minted and moved to exchanges. A potential rollback is under consideration, but it could erase legitimate post-attack transactions—an approach Harmony has faced controversy over in prior incidents. For traders, the key near-term signals are exchange freezing risk around the listed wallets, uncertainty on final supply figures, and heightened volatility as validators complete upgrades and rollback discussions progress.