Harmony confirmed on August 12 a flaw that allowed 4 billion ONEs to be created without authorization. At current prices, that’s about $3.2 million. The token lost 34% in 24 hours. The amount is not huge on the scale of crypto hacks. The problem is more serious: someone would have succeeded in directly increasing ONE’s supply.
In brief
- Harmony confirms unauthorized creation of 4 billion ONE.
- Around 97% of the tokens would have already left the attacker’s address.
- The technical cause of the flaw has not yet been made public.
Crypto: Harmony discovers 4 billion ONE outside the accounts
The alert came from Juiceberg on X. Harmony later confirmed the incident. Bad memory for the network: its Horizon bridge had already lost nearly 100 million dollars in 2022.
This time, no emptied bridge or compromised wallet, at least according to the information available. The attacker allegedly mined empty blocks to create 4 billion ONEs.
Another curiosity, and not the least: totalSupply would not have immediately recorded these new tokens. The offer displayed by certain tools therefore no longer corresponded to that which was actually circulating.
Harmony has not yet released a full technical explanation. The team is preparing a fix, working with several exchanges to block funds and considering a rollback. This last option would involve reverting the blockchain to a previous state.
The ONE crypto is now worth around $0.0008 after a 34% drop in one day. The 4 billion tokens created represent approximately $3.2 million.
This is little compared to the 100 million lost on Horizon. But the parallel is misleading. Here, the subject is not so much the amount as the very possibility of manufacturing ONEs outside of the planned rules.
The ONEs have already left for the exchanges
According to Juicebergthere would only be around 115 million ONE left on the attacker’s address. This represents 2.9% of the 4 billion created. The rest would have already been sold or sent to deposit addresses belonging to centralized platforms.
The room for maneuver is therefore narrow. Harmony can still try to freeze what remains identifiable. For the rest, everything will depend on the cooperation of the exchanges and the ability to follow the movements. This kind of hunting is nothing new in crypto. Funds move from one address to another, then look for an exit. In 2026, Ethereum and Solana were already among the main targets of crypto hackers.
Harmony still has one particularity. The incident does not appear to be limited to a third-party application. It is the network’s native token that finds itself at the heart of the flaw.
We don’t yet know how.
Software bug, misused privilege, consensus problem or other internal mechanism: Harmony has not published enough elements to decide. That’s probably more important, at this point, than how many dollars can be recovered.
Four years after Horizon, trust returns to the debate
As of June 2022, the Horizon Bridge lost nearly $100 million after its multisignature system was compromised. The FBI later attributed the attack to Lazarus Group and APT38, linked to North Korea.
Nothing today links the new rift to these groups.
But ONE holders have memory. Four years after Horizon, Harmony must once again explain why an operation impossible on paper could have occurred on its network.
A rollback can erase transactions. It doesn’t erase the questions.
Harmony will have to publish the exact cause, explain why totalSupply did not follow immediately and above all demonstrate that the method used can no longer work.
The crypto sector has become much less patient with projects that accumulate incidents. More than 100 crypto projects have already closed in 2026, sometimes after a succession of technical or financial problems. Harmony recognized the flaw quickly. It’s a start. But the real deal now comes down to a simple question: if 4 billion ONEs could be created once, what’s stopping it from happening again?
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