Once-hyped Ethereum rival Harmony wants to shut its blockchain over AI threats

Harmony, the high-throughput layer-1 blockchain that once promised to challenge Ethereum’s dominance with its sharding architecture, is proposing a permanent shutdown of its network. Core developers behind the protocol have initiated a proposal to voluntarily wind down the blockchain, arguing that maintaining validator security has become unsustainable against an escalating array of state-sponsored cyber threats and autonomous AI agents. The move marks a rare, stark admission of defeat in the smart contract platform wars, establishing a dramatic precedent where security overhead forces a network to shutter rather than slowly bleed out. Rather than burning the remaining economic runway, the team proposes a radical shift: redirecting future emissions of the native ONE token away from network validators and into funding an AI video generation business. For existing ONE holders, this forces a transition from decentralized infrastructure speculation to a venture-style bet on generative media. For the remaining developers building on the network, the proposal presents a grim ultimatum. Abandoned smart contracts and disrupted liquidity bridges mean dApp operators must either migrate to competing layer-2 networks or see their deployments marooned on an unmaintained chain. Harmony’s vulnerability is not news to seasoned market participants. The network never truly recovered from the catastrophic $100 million Horizon bridge exploit in 2022, linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, which drained user confidence and crippled its total value locked. However, pointing to AI-driven exploit vectors as a primary driver for the shutdown exposes a fresh structural risk for middle-tier blockchains. As malicious actors deploy machine-learning tools to automate vulnerability hunting across smart contracts and consensus layers, the financial burden of defending smaller layer-1 ecosystems is outstripping their transaction revenues. This maneuver also highlights a growing temptation across Web3: pivoting underperforming crypto projects into the booming artificial intelligence market. Yet, converting a layer-1 tokenomic model into a treasury for an AI enterprise sets a complicated governance precedent. It essentially treats a public utility chain as disposable seed capital. If Harmony’s community approves the transition, it could trigger a trend among other low-traction "zombie chains" seeking an exit strategy, transforming legacy crypto emissions into runway for AI startups while leaving early decentralized finance promises behind.