Digital Finance & Tokenization▼impact 4
Harmony's ONE token plunges about 31% after massive unauthorized minting
On August 12, an incident believed to involve unauthorized minting of the native token ONE occurred on the Layer 1 blockchain Harmony. Harmony announced on its official X account that it is working with exchanges to block and freeze the movement of related funds, disclosed four wallet addresses connected to the incident, and requested exchanges to freeze them. The scale of the unauthorized minting has not been confirmed. On-chain analyst Juiceberg pointed out that about 4 billion ONE may have been generated, of which about 2.8 billion ONE may have been sent to exchanges, while BlockWatchdog estimated about 30.1 trillion ONE, showing a large gap between the two estimates. Harmony released an emergency patch, Mainnet Release 2026.1.1, to prevent additional unauthorized minting, asked all validators to upgrade, and temporarily suspended its official cross-chain bridge. At the time of the announcement, 53% of validators had applied the emergency patch, and Harmony explained that a rollback is the most supported practical solution, but implementation has not been decided. ONE fell about 31.0% from a closing price of about 0.187 yen on August 11, before the incident came to light, to about 0.129 yen on August 12, and its market capitalization decreased by about 870 million yen, from about 2.81 billion yen to about 1.938 billion yen.