Harmony Confirms Unauthorized Mint of 4 Billion ONE Tokens as Price Crashes Over 30%

• Harmony confirmed an exploit that allowed unauthorized minting of approximately 4 billion ONE tokens, equal to about 26% of the existing supply.
• ONE price dropped as much as 40% in Asian trading, briefly hitting an all-time low near $0.00057 before recovering partially.
• Roughly 2.8 billion newly minted tokens moved to exchanges; the team is coordinating freezes and evaluating a potential chain rollback.

Harmony confirmed on Wednesday that an attacker minted roughly 4 billion ONE tokens without authorization, representing about 26% of the token’s pre-incident supply of around 15 billion, according to on-chain reports the project addressed.

The incident was first flagged by on-chain analyst Juiceberg, who reported in an X post that the tokens were created via empty blocks and that the totalSupply endpoint did not immediately reflect the inflation. About 2.8 billion of the new tokens were quickly funneled to exchanges, with roughly 115 million remaining on-chain.

In a direct response on X, Harmony stated: “We are working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds. We are working on a patch and rollback options. Will update when we have new information.”

The project later listed four specific wallet addresses linked to the activity and asked all exchanges to block and freeze any related funds. It also paused its cross-chain bridge as a precaution, according to subsequent updates.

ONE’s price reacted sharply during Asian morning hours on August 12, falling more than 30% and touching an all-time low of approximately $0.0005735 before a partial rebound, as reported by CoinDesk and BeInCrypto. At the time of the initial reports, the token was trading around $0.0008, down roughly 34% over 24 hours.

This is not Harmony’s first major security issue. The network’s Horizon bridge was exploited for nearly $100 million in 2022, an attack later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. A separate staking bug in 2023 also led to the improper creation of about 146.3 million ONE tokens.

A blockchain rollback would aim to reverse the unauthorized mint by returning the chain to a state prior to the exploit, though such measures grow more complex once assets reach centralized exchanges. Harmony is preparing software patches while coordinating with trading venues, per coverage from The Block.

Further details on the precise vulnerability remain under investigation as of the latest statements.